HOLLYWOOD

Dietrich was sitting in her cabin, looking at the many bouquets of flowers from the premiere on the previous day and wondering whether they would still be fresh when she got to America. The Bremen had left Bremerhaven at 10 a.m. Resi, her dressing-room attendant, grew seasick, and then, to make matters worse, her dentures fell into the water. She staunchly refused to walk on deck with Dietrich. Not that anyone was interested in the actress—for most of the people on the ship, she was an attractive woman unaccompanied by a man. The passenger list indicates that she registered as “Marie Sieber-Dietrich, married, actress from Berlin,” and gave her age as twenty-five, thus making herself three years younger.¹ Marie Sieber-Dietrich and her housekeeper Theresia Kunzmann were traveling as first-class passengers. In a photograph of her first time crossing the Atlantic, Dietrich is seated on her mountain of luggage, which consisted of several suitcases plus an array of bags bound with cords and wicker baskets. (Later she would always travel with monogrammed wardrobe trunks.) She is gazing intently into the camera in a tense pose. The huge luxury ship with eleven decks and four passenger classes frightened her. She spent most of her time in her cabin. The ballroom, library, swimming pool, and fashion salon on the ship held little interest for her. After months of demanding work under intense strain, Dietrich was exhausted. Suddenly no one was telling her what to do. The applause when she was standing onstage at the Gloria Palace was still ringing in her ears. Berlin was already in her past, and Hollywood was not yet her future.

“Frau Dietrich, you are wanted at the telephone!” With these words, the adorable little page interrupted my reveries while I was lying on a comfortable deck chair. For the first time in my life, I got to use my knowledge of American slang when I replied: “Quit your kidding!” which means something along the lines of: Don’t make fun of me. “But madam, there is most certainly a telephone call for you!” . . . That was quite a sensation! Friends were calling me up to tell me about the great box office and critical success of my latest movie. I was beside myself with joy, because we had truly worked hard and were devoted body and soul. And the success was a fabulous reward, which greatly eased my understandable nervousness about my American debut and filled me with hope. Large numbers of radiograms came my way every day, as though it were necessary to keep my thoughts of Berlin alive.²

Telegrams, sea voyages, telephone calls, solitude, doubts, and waiting would be part of Dietrich’s life from this point on. She would commute between Europe and America, at times with lovers at her side; she would visit her daughter Maria; and she would exchange letters and telegrams with her husband Rudi, but once the Bremen set sail on the morning of April 2, 1930, she would essentially always be alone to the end of her life. Now, too, she sat by herself in her cabin, hearing and reading about her triumph in faraway Berlin: “The event: Marlene Dietrich. Her singing and acting come across as almost detached, lethargic. But this sensual lethargy is arousing. She is crude in an unforced manner. Everything is film, and nothing is theater. For the first time, the audience could hear a woman’s voice in a sound film with timbre, tone quality, and expression. Extraordinary.”³ Even Heinrich Mann chimed in to the chorus of praise. Erich Pommer had brought a copy of The Blue Angel to him in Nice, and there he saw it for the first time. In an empty movie theater on the beach, he encountered the big-screen versions of the characters he had created in his novel.

Marlene Dietrich is the physical embodiment of Lola Lola. . . . When she sings the famous refrain “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt . . . ” [the English-language version of which is “Falling in Love Again”] for the final time in the movie, she brings the philosophy of the work to the fore with a terrifying intensity. She embodies carnal love through and through with her bare sensuality, and she sings of her own destiny and that of the broken man who drags himself through snow-covered streets to his final place of refuge. I don’t think that an artist could possibly identify more strongly with the character the artist is portraying.⁴

Josef von Sternberg had already been informed about the positive reception of the movie in Germany. It is difficult to say whether he cared, because in his autobiography he claimed to be relieved to have left Germany. “As the Bremen pushed itself away from the shores of Germany I watched the receding decks and turned to my assistant to say, ‘I’m glad that’s over. Let’s hope that nobody follows me.’ ”⁵ He most certainly hoped that Dietrich would follow him.

Their next movie together was about the fate of a woman who follows the man she loves. Intentionally or not, Dietrich had given von Sternberg the book that would be adapted for her first American movie. In her usual considerate way, she gave him a basket with some travel materials before he left for America, which contained the 1927 novel Amy Jolly by Benno Vigny. Her view of the book was not very positive; she told von Sternberg it was “weak lemonade.”⁶ But he saw it as a promising gambit to feature Dietrich as a foreigner in her first American movie. He wanted the plot to be short on dialogue and long on images, because he was horrified by her German accent and felt strongly that “an image that had no accent, German or otherwise, could not be subjected to a guttural pronunciation.”⁷

Jo would not meet up with Dietrich until she arrived in Los Angeles; she would have to take her first steps into the New World on her own. An extended period of bad weather delayed the arrival of the Bremen, but on the morning of April 9, the ship finally approached the New York harbor. Off in the distance, the skyscrapers came into view; the ship headed for the mouth of the Hudson and at long last came to the North German Lloyd pier in Brooklyn. Dietrich waited in her cabin for someone to pick her up. She had chosen a gray outfit for the morning of her arrival, just as her grandmother would have done, figuring that she could not go wrong with that. There was a knock at the door, and a well-dressed gentleman entered, who introduced himself as Mr. Blumenthal of Paramount Pictures. He had come to escort her ashore. Blumenthal looked her up and down with a critical eye and informed her with a charming smile that she could not leave the ship looking the way she did. She failed to grasp what he was getting at. Her stockings did not have any holes, her skirt was not too short, and her jacket was spotless. Blumenthal told her bluntly that in this outfit, the Americans would think she was a lesbian. He advised her to leave the ship in a black dress and a mink coat.⁸ Dietrich understood that it would be best to follow his advice. “As the ship moored and I stood in the morning sun in a black dress and a mink coat, I was both excited and fearful.”⁹ It dawned on her that a new chapter of her life was about to begin. However, there was no time to mull over this prospect. Blumenthal asked her to take a seat in the limousine that was waiting for her. They drove through long straight roads lined with high-rise buildings. He dropped her off at the elegant Hotel Ambassador, where the press conference would be taking place.

That evening, Dietrich had an appointment with Walter Wanger, the vice president of Paramount, who would be showing her around New York along with his wife. When she arrived at the reception desk at the appointed hour, she saw a handsome man standing there who looked to be in his mid-thirties. He came up to her with a smile and kissed her hand. “My wife’s not feeling well,” he told her, “so we’ll have a tête-à-tête dinner.”¹⁰ Wanger was the great exception among the movie bigwigs. He spoke perfect German and French and was “college-educated, with excellent manners, liberal opinions, but evasive and ‘diplomatic.’ ”¹¹ He brought Dietrich to a speakeasy, and she was fascinated to see how the guests reached under the table to pour themselves scotch or bourbon from the bottles they hid there. All of a sudden, Wanger whisked her onto the dance floor. She was so annoyed at his authoritarian behavior that she seized the first possible opportunity to make a quick exit. Her pride was wounded. Paramount had hired her as an actress, not an escort. When she got back to her hotel, she called Jo, who told her to leave New York the very next morning and not to talk to anyone. We may never know whether this account of her first night in New York is true, but it does say something about her feeling that Americans were phonies who put on a show of morality while reaching under the table for their whiskey; they masqueraded as gentlemen but left their wives at home and sought adventure elsewhere. The only person she could trust in this vast country was Josef von Sternberg.

Hollywood was almost three thousand miles from New York. The fastest train took two nights and three days. Dietrich and Resi had to change trains several times; as they ate their tasteless meals, they wondered what they were doing in this country. Every time Dietrich woke up from a nap and looked out the window to see the unvarying view, she felt as though they had made no headway at all. Endless fields of grain alternated with small towns boasting a movie theater, a gas station, and a drugstore. There was not a single human being as far as the eye could see. Finally von Sternberg appeared on the platform like a mirage. As usual, he was dressed to the nines. “Now all was well—as always with him, he had ‘taken us over,’ ” she fondly recalled.¹²

Jo had told her that on his first visit to Hollywood he felt as though he was far from civilization. Hollywood was nothing but an empty village where the streets were lined with eucalyptus trees. Most of the studios were vacant. On occasion he would see a limousine bringing an actor to work. “I knew that there were famous stars in the community who lived in castles on the hills which surrounded their workshops. Hollywood Boulevard showed an occasional cowboy, but most of the time the sun shone on people who had migrated from Iowa, Kansas, and Minnesota.”¹³

When Dietrich arrived in Los Angeles, she faced the traffic of a modern city with more than a million inhabitants roaring by. The warm climate, the lovely beaches, the scent of orange blossoms, and the vast expanse made this part of the world seem like paradise. Von Sternberg’s welcome present was a Rolls Royce and a chauffeur; he had instructed her not to drive. Paramount’s publicity photos show her next to this outsized Rolls Royce. She later noted on the back of one of these photos: “Wish I had it still.” Dietrich met with photographers and costume designers. She was homesick for Berlin and longed to see her daughter, but she reveled in von Sternberg’s unconditional love. His wife Riza filed a complaint against Dietrich, blaming Dietrich for her marital estrangement, but he refused to let anything distract him from his goal of making a motion picture that would live up to the high standards he had set for himself, bring in a great deal of money for Paramount, and make an utterly unknown German woman the new star of Hollywood. He chose two utterly dissimilar men to costar with her: Adolphe Menjou, a well-known silent film actor who had acted with Rudolph Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Gary Cooper to play Menjou’s rival.¹⁴ Cooper’s prior roles had portrayed him as the good, honest, handsome American cowboy. But von Sternberg had something else in mind for him.

The filming of Morocco began in July. Dietrich’s very first shot seemed doomed to failure when she had trouble pronouncing the simple sentence: “I won’t need any help.” To make matters worse, she was surrounded by a crowd of inquisitive spectators. Somehow she managed to get through the day, but by the evening, in her dressing room, she was drowning in misery. She wanted to get back to Germany as fast as she could, and her director sensed that. “Von Sternberg was standing at my dressing room door; after knocking lightly, he came in. He cheered me up within twenty minutes. ‘Never break off your contract, rule numero uno. Never give up, rule numero due. In other words, stay.’ That’s what he said to me.”¹⁵ As always, she followed his advice. On August 18, 1930, the shooting of Morocco was completed. Dietrich had come through just fine.

Before Dietrich appears onscreen as Amy Jolly in Morocco, a foghorn is heard. As she heads to the railing to watch the ship dock, her suitcase opens and dolls fall out. (One of those same dolls had been in the dressing room in The Blue Angel.) A man in a trenchcoat comes to her aid. He is not put off by her standoffish behavior, but seems to take an interest in the beautiful stranger. When he asks a ship’s deck officer whether he knows this woman, the officer replies with a disparaging glance: “A vaudeville actress, probably. Oh, we carry them every day. We call them ‘suicide passengers.’ One way ticket. They never return.” That is the scene that introduced Marlene Dietrich to the American public. Von Sternberg cleverly tied her situation in real life to that of the woman she was playing onscreen. But the first scene of the movie is Gary Cooper’s. Cooper plays the foreign legionnaire Tom Brown, who is returning with his troops to the city of Mogador from battles in the desert. Lee Garmes, von Sternberg’s cinematographer, captured this world as an impenetrable thicket of light and shadow, white garments and headgear against dark skin and uniforms. We meet up with him again in a kind of nightclub that is frequented by natives and foreigners. The gentlemen are wearing burnouses, tailcoats, or uniforms. The man from the ship is in this group as well. He is introduced as a wealthy Frenchman named La Bessière. While Brown finds a seat downstairs, La Bessière joins the table of an adjutant named Caesar and his wife up in the gallery. Madame Caesar, who is obviously bored, also seems to be one of Brown’s playmates. We see the beautiful stranger from the ship in her dressing room, preparing for her performance. She is now wearing a men’s dress shirt, enjoying a cigarette, fanning herself, humming a song, and admiring her reflection in her hand mirror. Then Dietrich emerges from behind the curtain and radiates indifference even to the hooting and the jeering of her disgruntled audience at the sight of her top hat and tails. Dietrich performs her song, “Quand l’amour meurt,” in her inimitable way, neither melodious nor mellifluous, but triumphant. Brown sees her as a kindred spirit. With a somewhat military tip of his cap he salutes her, and she reciprocates with a tip of her top hat.¹⁶ The women are annoyed by the intrusion of this strange rival in men’s clothing. Dietrich plucks a flower from behind the ear of a woman who is giggling at her and asks whether she can keep it. When the woman consents, Amy Jolly kisses her on the mouth.¹⁷ This oft-cited kiss is a deft display of Amy’s superiority and seductive prowess. She takes the flower and throws it to Brown, who sticks it behind his ear as she prepares for her next number. While she is unreceptive to La Bessière’s overtures, she gives her apartment key to Brown.

On her wall is a set of photographs that could just as easily have come from the life of Dietrich or Lola Lola as Amy Jolly, and on her bed is her collection of dolls. Nothing much happens beyond lingering gazes, a show of legs, kisses, lighting cigarettes, and blowing out matches lasciviously. Amy knows that you never ask why someone has become a Legionnaire, and Brown says he buried his past when he entered the Legion. Now it is her turn to confess: “There’s a foreign legion of women, too, but we have no uniforms, no flags—and no medals when we are brave and no wound stripes when we are hurt.”

Meanwhile, Adjutant Caesar has found out that his wife has been cheating on him with Tom, and sends him off on a suicide mission. Amy appears with La Bessière to say goodbye to him. She is elegantly dressed and evidently planning to marry La Bessière. Brown and his fellow legionnaires are accompanied by a crowd of women. “Who are these women?” Amy asks the man who has stayed with her. “I would call them the rear guard.” She: “Those women must be mad.” He: “I don’t know. You see, they love their men.”

On the evening of their engagement party, she hears the trumpets and drums of the returning legion. Out of her mind with excitement, she jumps up, her string of pearls rips apart, and she hurries out onto the street. She finds Brown in a bar having a good time with women, music, and liquor. When she discovers that he has carved her name and a heart in the table, she thinks she finally has proof of his love. The next morning, she comes to the edge of town with her fiancé. The two men and the woman say goodbye in a polite and distant manner. The wind is gusting; one step through the city gate and the desert begins. The Legionnaires report for duty, and the women with goats lug their belongings. Amy looks desperate. Legionnaire Brown turns to her with his charming smile and uses his fingers to indicate their familiar greeting; she returns the gesture. He marches off. Leaning on the gate, she watches the Legionnaires and their women. Amy goes back to the car, embraces La Bessière, gives him a kiss on the hand (as an expression of gratitude, not love), then strides through the gate, her clothes fluttering in the wind and her feet sinking into the sand up to her ankles. She sheds her elegant shoes, leaves them lying in the sand, and does not look back. The wind blows away any traces of her, and La Bessière and the movie audience stare into the void. In the end, all we hear is the whistling of the wind.

Brown, the rogue, stays true to his company, which is why he forsakes the love of the beautiful stranger. La Bessière, by contrast, vacillates between feelings and conventions. The special relationship between La Bessière and Amy is reflected in the similarity of their clothing, from their tailcoats to the light trenchcoats they both have on when they are looking for Brown.¹⁸ Von Sternberg staged this film like a silent movie, but he advanced the plot adroitly by means of sounds and music. The trumpets and drums signal not only the arrival and departure of the Legion, but also Amy’s fate.

On the evening of the premiere, in the famous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, Dietrich got a preview of her impending fame. Banners bearing her name were hanging out in front, and the red carpet was rolled out. She was surprised and asked von Sternberg in a whisper whether this event would also be covered in the Berliner Zeitung back in Germany. All of Hollywood turned out on this evening: Charlie Chaplin; Adolphe Zukor, the president of Paramount Pictures; Douglas Fairbanks; Mary Pickford; and Irving Thalberg and his wife, Norma Shearer. Dietrich wore a black chiffon dress and a cape adorned with silver fox tails. She looked elegant and European—just the way her lover liked to see her.

Dietrich as Amy Jolly was neither the great sophisticate nor the emancipated flapper nor the bisexual temptress. Quite the opposite: Amy Jolly is a marked woman who wants to be saved by the love of a man. In forsaking herself in order to find herself, she realizes that her life as she knows it will cease to exist. The deck officer’s prediction comes true: she will never return. She goes off barefoot into the desert. The ending of this movie is one of the most famous in the history of the cinema.

To Dietrich’s astonished delight, her performance in Morocco pleased both viewers and critics. Sergei Eisenstein cabled von Sternberg: OF ALL YOUR GREAT WORKS, MOROCCO IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL. ADMIRATION AND LOVE TO YOU AND MARLENE.¹⁹ After this success, Paramount offered her a new contract: $125,000 per movie, with two movies a year. Paramount was hoping that Dietrich would be its answer to Greta Garbo. In Hollywood, she had to show that she was on par with Garbo’s star quality, yet entirely different. She accomplished this by letting the public in on her life. Garbo did not grant interviews or give the public glimpses into her personal life. She never wrote memoirs or appeared on television. At the height of her fame, she would retire from the world of film and insist on staying out of sight and maintaining her silence. Dietrich, by contrast, kept her public informed about her affairs, her recipes, her parenting, and her furniture. She did not withdraw from the public eye until the final years of her life, at which point she—like Garbo—retreated into the anonymity of a big city. But in 1930 in Hollywood, Dietrich was anchored in the real world, with Garbo up in the sphere of the divine. Garbo’s appeal came from her aloofness from the social realm, which is where Dietrich sparkled. Dietrich worked with her body; Garbo’s face left her body behind. Dietrich always kept pace with the times, while Garbo radiated classic immutable beauty: “She is always herself, and carries without pretense, under her crown or her wide-brimmed hats, the same snowy solitary face.”²⁰ The derisive pleasure and the self-mockery of a Dietrich were alien to her. But both of them were European women who played roles that were not intended for Americans.

In Berlin it would never have occurred to Dietrich to go on a diet, but in Hollywood she felt fat. Von Sternberg loved women “full of life, with thighs, breasts, and sex appeal,” yet Dietrich wanted to be as slender as the American women.²¹ She did not especially like the women in Hollywood, whom she described as bossy and grasping, but she was impressed by the looks and lifestyle of American women. Working women were not a rarity in the United States, for far longer than had been the case in Germany. Women were expected to look sophisticated and dress in the latest styles. In the 1930s, it became fashionable for women to polish their fingernails, go to the hairdresser, show off their figures, and wear sheer stockings and subtle makeup. Dietrich was drawn to the pragmatic modernity of America, which she found lacking in Europe.

A few weeks after the filming of Morocco wrapped up, the shooting began for Dishonored, her third movie with von Sternberg. Gary Cooper was the first choice for the male leading role, but he turned it down. He did not want to subject himself to von Sternberg’s transformations one more time. Of course rumors were swirling about an affair between Dietrich and Cooper, but Dietrich later provided a matter-of-fact explanation for von Sternberg’s jealousy: “You know, he couldn’t stand it if I looked up at any man in a movie. . . . It would infuriate him—and Cooper was very tall—and you know, Jo was not.”²² Victor McLaglen, a British swashbuckler and former professional boxer, took the role instead. And it is easy to see that Dietrich was not pleased with her tough counterpart. There is no singing in this movie, but there are several awkward piano interludes by the leading actress.

In the opening scene, we see a pair of nice-looking women’s legs up to the knee. They are standing in high-heeled shoes in the rain. The woman straightens out one of her stockings, then wheels around. The camera travels up to the face of Marlene Dietrich, which is alluringly concealed behind the veil of her little hat. She is a prostitute who is dressed like a lady as she waits for johns. The man she takes home with her is the head of the Austrian secret service. After she gives a sample of her patriotism, he tries to recruit her as a spy, attempting to sweeten the deal with the prospect of travel and beautiful clothing, but she cuts him off by saying, “What appeals to me is the chance to serve my country.” He had not counted on a woman who sold her body being unwilling to sell out. X-27 (her spy name) is a widow named Kolverer whose husband died in the war. Her mission is to turn in two high-ranking officers who are suspected of working for the Russian enemy. She quickly hunts down the first of them, but she falls in love with the second one, Lieutenant Kranau. The initial showdown between the two takes place in her boudoir. He defends his actions by attacking her: “I’m a soldier, but you bring something into war that doesn’t belong in it. You trick men into death with your body.” He fails to grasp the fact that she also regards herself as a soldier who is trying to restore her lost honor by serving her country. After many adventures, they see each other once again at the Austrian headquarters. The Russian prisoners of war, including Kranau, are brought out. X-27, clad in a leather uniform, asks for permission to interrogate him. She enables him to escape and is court-martialed for her actions. The presiding judge asks her why she has betrayed her country for the sake of a passing affection. “Maybe I loved him” is her terse reply. The execution is set for the following morning. Her last wish is to die in the uniform in which she served her fellow countrymen, by which she means the suit with the fur trim. She saunters up to the site of her execution in a ladylike manner. Young men with rifles are awaiting her. She uses the sword of the captain in command as a mirror to freshen her lipstick. The young man who has been assigned the task of overseeing the execution shouts that he refuses to do so. She straightens her stockings while he delivers his passionate plea. Widow Kolverer evidently considers his behavior unseemly, and is shot instead by the lieutenant who is next in line. The lovely corpse lies in the courtyard, and the young soldiers march off. The old head of the secret service salutes X-27 as he leaves.

Dishonored is a flawed film that was slapped together far too hastily. Von Sternberg makes the viewer the accomplice of his longings as the camera rests on Dietrich’s legs, breasts, hips, and ankles. A combination of a diet, sheer determination to succeed, homesickness, work, and love had made Dietrich lose quite a bit of weight, and she could now show off her figure in clingy outfits and uniforms. The theme of the movie is loyalty and betrayal. Kolverer no longer offers her body for money, but for her country. As a captain’s widow, prostitute, spy, and traitor, she embodies both honor and dishonor. The focal point of the movie is Dietrich’s body, and the plot a mere extension of her physicality. She remains true to herself, not pretending to be anything other than a woman who sells herself. The men need to don uniforms to carry out their treachery; she relies on intelligence and sex. Like Morocco before it, Dishonored portrays the self-destruction of a woman who falls victim to love. The film’s flaws notwithstanding, the historian Carlo Ginzburg has called Dishonored the “most beautiful movie in the history of the cinema.”²³

And then Dietrich was back at Bahnhof Zoo in Berlin. Once the filming was complete, there was nothing to keep her in Hollywood. She longed to go home and be with her child, her friends, Rudi, and the city of Berlin. It was only when she got back that she realized how much had happened over the past few months. Only a year had passed since von Sternberg came into her life, yet everything had changed. She was famous. She was still self-conscious of what she thought of as her ducklike nose, but she was getting better at hiding these kinds of feelings. When she heard the familiar diction of Berlin, she realized how much she had missed all of this while she was under the palm trees. Dietrich was happy “to be in this Berlin, which I will never flush from my blood,” as she confided to Franz Hessel.²⁴ Christmas was a few short weeks away, and she was looking forward to celebrating Maria’s birthday with her. Of course she did not check into a hotel, but instead stayed at her old apartment on Kaiserallee. She knew that the love affair between Rudi and Tamara was still going on, and although she had no actual objections, she wanted to be the one to set the tone. The role she defended more than any other in her life was that of wife and mother. Her daughter needed a moment to grasp the fact that the slender woman who never stopped talking, filled the hall with her huge wardrobe trunks, and was constantly being called to the telephone was her own mother. Maria described her mother’s return home in terms that suggested that her life was being taken over by a stranger.²⁵ That year the Christmas tree was gigantic, and Maria was given a gift of a grocery-store replica that would have been the envy of her friends, had she known any other children; instead, she had to play alone or with Tamara.²⁶

Dietrich may have sensed that she had come home only to say goodbye. As Stephen Spender wrote, Germany had become so politicized that it was now divided against itself. “Berlin was the tension, the poverty, the anger, the prostitution, the hope and despair thrown out onto the streets. It was the blatant rich at the smart restaurants, the prostitutes in army top boots at corners, the grim, submerged-looking Communists in processions, and the violent youths who suddenly emerged from nowhere into the Wittenbergplatz and shouted: ‘Deutschland Erwache!’ ”²⁷ Dietrich wanted to make as much of an impression on Berlin as possible in a short time. Quite likely she was hoping for a follow-up career in Europe. In March 1931, she made disc recordings at the Ultraphon studio. The songs she sang included “Peter,” Hollaender’s “Johnny wenn du Geburtstag hast,” and the film hit “Leben ohne Liebe kannst du nicht”; her friend Mischa Spoliansky had written the music for this song, and he accompanied her on the piano at the studio as well. “Leben ohne Liebe kannst du nicht” was one of her mother’s favorite songs, which indicates that this severe woman must have had a very sentimental side as well. Peter Kreuder conducted the orchestra. Back in February 1930, Dietrich had recorded all the songs from The Blue Angel, and the vocal numbers from Morocco were already for sale as records. Her records sold well and provided a solid source of revenue for the rest of her life. Dietrich’s songs were sung and whistled by teenagers, housewives, attorneys, and factory workers, and appealed to people from every walk of life. The photographs from the recording studio show a self-assured, cheerful Dietrich wearing a two-piece men’s suit with a tie, shirt, cuff links, and breast-pocket handkerchief.

She did not want to go back to America alone, so she took Maria with her. She was indifferent to what the Hollywood bosses might think when their femme fatale turned out to be a loving mother. The only one who mattered was Jo, and he liked Maria. The day before Dietrich left Berlin, her mother threw a party for her. Her friends and admirers gathered on Kaiserallee to say goodbye. They all waited for Dietrich to put in an appearance. Her cousin, Hasso Felsing, who was among the guests at this party, realized how quickly she had learned to act like a star. Dietrich could afford to keep the others waiting. Finally she turned up. Leaning against the doorway in a decorative pose, she declared to the group: “Darlings, here I am.” Everyone erupted in cheers.

About a month later, on May 22, 1931, she sent a telegram from Los Angeles to Rudi Sieber at the Hotel Eden in Berlin: MY DEAR HOW DO YOU LIKE BERLIN WE ARE THINKING OF YOU LONGINGLY YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST VISIT US I HAVE TO FIND AN OPPORTUNITY THE CHILD IS TOO DIVINE TO ENJOY HER ALONE MILLION KISSES MUTTIKATER. Dietrich was “Mutti,” and Maria was “Kater,” so the family called them “Muttikater.” She did not want to be without her child, and she did not care whether that was a smart move. When it came to family, she had no intention of adapting to American customs. “Paramount Studios had strictly forbidden any mention of my maternity. I wasn’t willing to submit to this regulation.”²⁸ She had a transatlantic marriage, and she wanted her child to feel just as much at home in America as she did in Europe. Maybe she was hoping that Riza von Sternberg would finally let up on her if her rival’s role as a mother was emphasized. But maybe Dietrich also wanted to prevent Jo from becoming overly possessive by living with Maria. Von Sternberg could be the director and lover of the mother, acquaintance of the father, and friend of the daughter, but the family was and would remain Rudi, Marlene, and Maria.

While she was in Europe, von Sternberg picked out a new abode, a Spanish-style art deco villa on North Roxbury Drive, for the woman he adored. North Roxbury Drive was the “street of stars.” The interior of the house was quite luxurious, with the standard Hollywood look featuring a great many mirrored walls. The front of this house seemed like a fortress. It was impossible to peer inside. The façade appeared to be hermetically sealed. Dashiell Hammett wrote that it was rumored in Hollywood that von Sternberg and Dietrich were “living in sin.”²⁹ The two of them hid behind the forbidding walls of this fortress and were happy to leave the world outside.

For Dietrich, who was used to the exciting night life and cultural offerings in Berlin, Los Angeles had little to offer. Von Sternberg did not like to socialize and disparaged the “Coconut Grove culture” of Hollywood. In his view, culture was a dirty word in this town. He wanted Dietrich all for himself and did not allow anyone to take up direct contact with her. While he read scripts in the evening, she may have been wondering whether the delectable goulash was on that evening’s menu at Mutzbauer. Maria had quickly grown accustomed to the warm climate, the wonderfully blue sky, the scent of jasmine, the villa, and the fabulous food. She was privately tutored and had a governess, and needed to be at her mother’s beck and call. Several sequences of Dietrich’s colorful home movies show the family life of this threesome on North Roxbury Drive. Dietrich and Maria are romping at the pool, and von Sternberg is posing with Maria in front of the camera, smiling more broadly than usual. In one set of pictures that von Sternberg took of the two of them at the pool, we see what appears to be a cheery six-year-old girl with her happy mother. Maria was not the only one in the family to have left Berlin; Rudi had gone as well. The last time they celebrated Christmas in their apartment was 1930. Never again would they live together as a family. Right after his wife and daughter left Germany, Rudi moved to Paris with his lover. When he returned to Berlin, he would stay at the Hotel Eden.

On November 7, 1931, Josefine sent a telegram to her daughter: RUDI ASKS FOR YOUR CONSENT SOON TO GIVE UP 54 HE SAYS SINCE IS NOT ENOUGH FOR DEFINITIVE RETURN MORE PRACTICAL HOTEL MONTHS FURNISHED PLACE OR HOTEL. Dietrich’s reply to her husband shows that she considered this suggestion unreasonable: I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY MUTTI DOESN’T TAKE OUR FLAT AND ACTS LIKE OWNER OF ALL OUR THINGS I HATE THE IDEA OF DESTROYING OUR HOME WOULD LIKE THAT EVERYTHING STAY AS IT IS UNTIL I COME BACK AND BUY OR RENT A HOUSE I DON’T INTEND TO LIVE THERE I JUST WANT IT AS A PLACE FOR OUR THINGS. . . . MILLION KISSES MUTTIKATER.³⁰ For her, there was still a “we,” which no longer existed for Rudi. She wrote him that for her, closing down the apartment would spell the end of the home they had shared, but that did not seem to interest him, and he did not reply to this comment in his letters.

Sieber had found a job as production manager of the European branch of Paramount in Paris, most likely on von Sternberg’s recommendation. The advantage of this was that he was on the scene for the synchronization of the Dietrich and von Sternberg movies. Sieber, who was fluent in French, enjoyed residing in Paris.³¹ He could live with Tamara openly and dispense with all the sneaking around. This was probably also why he was so eager to get rid of the apartment in Berlin. Sieber had discovered his fondness for the good life. Even decades later, he still knew where to buy the best caviar and cognac in Paris. He was happy to give up Berlin, while Dietrich was homesick in her villa in Beverly Hills.

In the same year that Dietrich was born, seven-year-old Jonas Sternberg (Josef von Sternberg’s birth name) crossed the Atlantic for the first time with his mother and his two siblings to live with his father, who had emigrated several years earlier. After three years the family returned to Vienna, where Jonas gravitated to the Prater, which featured a flea circus, performers of all kinds, women who were sawed in half, sword swallowers, and elephants on tightropes. Time and again, his movies would reenact scenes from the Prater. The boy developed a fine sense of the erotic enticements that surrounded him: he kept a close eye on the maids who were on the lookout for dashing officers and was left speechless at the sight of a girl sitting upside-down on the swing in some Vienna basement, showing the boys what was under her dress. When he was fourteen, he went back to New York, taking his memories of eroticism, performance art and artificiality, dark secrets, and mind-boggling spectacles with him to the New World. A year in high school brought his formal education to an end, after which time he found a job as an errand boy in a lace warehouse on Fifth Avenue and learned the differences between rose point and lace from Brussels, Chantilly, and Venice. These were his years as an apprentice in eroticism, because lace and women’s skin went together. His coworkers entertained him with stories of brothels and the resultant quests for medical help. He left the apparel industry with quite a bit of knowledge about matters pertaining to lace and syphilis.

When his mother turned her back on the family, he also ran away from home. At the age of sixteen, he was alone and abandoned in the big city. He eked out a living with odd jobs and eventually wound up at the movie business. Jonas Sternberg began at the very bottom; he became a gofer for a man who cleaned and coated films in his basement. There followed jobs as projectionist, film repairer, and finally as personal assistant to a film producer. During the war, he made films for the U.S. Army that trained soldiers in the use of weapons, and when the war ended he continued to learn everything he could about film, working as an author, editor, and assistant to various directors. Eventually he was hired as an assistant director in Hollywood, and in the credits for the movie By Divine Right, his name was lengthened to Josef von Sternberg, much to his own surprise. In 1924, he directed his first movie, Salvation Hunters, for which he had also written the screenplay. Overnight, he was famous.

Photographs of von Sternberg and Dietrich together in Berlin show not two separate individuals, but a symbiosis. Although they are not touching, they appear to blend. Photographs, letters, telegrams, gifts from von Sternberg, and Dietrich’s memoirs attest to their love. She later wrote:

He didn’t want me to talk about him. Well, since he’s dead now, I’m free to do so. He created me. . . . The eye behind the camera, the eye that loves the creature whose image will be captured on the film, is the creator of the wondrous effect that emanates from this being and evokes praise and enthusiasm from moviegoers all over the world. All that is precisely calculated and not by chance. It is a combination of technical and psychological knowledge, and pure love.³²

Von Sternberg sent her a monogrammed vanity case. He loved the way she transformed herself in front of the mirror, the eccentric finery, and the ways she augmented her beauty. In the photographs she handed out of herself in 1929 in Berlin, she had been made to look like a female impersonator. Aside from her daughter, her musical saw, and a few recordings, she did not seem to attach any lasting value to things. “As I came to know more about her I also became familiar with the conditions that had produced her, her family, and the circle around her. Her energy to survive and to rise above her environment must have been fantastic. She was subject to severe depressions, though these were balanced by periods of unbelievable vigor.”³³

Von Sternberg sensed that Dietrich was prepared to do anything, even transform herself into his work of art. “Josef von Sternberg was the only person I allowed to patronize, instruct, and control me.”³⁴ He made her into the woman that he aimed to identify with. “I am Marlene,” he declared, thus recalling Flaubert’s equation of himself and the heroine of his novel.³⁵ On the photograph she sent him in May 1931, she wrote: “To my creator, from his creation.” He sent her a photo of himself on which he wrote: “For Marlene—what am I, really, without you?”

In contrast to Flaubert, von Sternberg was dealing with a flesh-and-blood woman. MY DEAR I AM TERRIBLY LONELY AND DON’T KNOW HOW I WILL STAND THIS LONG TIME YOU ARE MY WHOLE WORLD AND ONLY YOUR TELEGRAMS GIVE ME STRENGTH TO BREATHE . . . MY LONGING IS ENDLESS DON’T CRY AND DON’T STAY AWAY TOO LONG I ADORE YOU JO.³⁶ He was closest to her when they were making films together. During these periods, he was her creator and her lover all at the same time.

In August 1931, they began shooting Shanghai Express. The action begins at a train station in Beijing. Von Sternberg leads his audience right into an alien and bewildering world, just as he had done in Morocco. Dietrich’s character casually steps out of a taxi, shows her ticket, and heads to the train, although her manner of dress is anything but casual. She is in black, but this black shimmers in the sun and seems ablaze with color. She has wrapped a feather boa around her shoulders, and her hair is covered with a tight-fitting cap. She is a rare black bird amidst the brightly clad travelers. One of them claims that she has already wrecked the lives of a dozen men. She is met with mistrust and fear and winds up sharing her compartment with the only Chinese woman, Hui Fei, a reserved, stern-looking, allegedly disreputable woman. Shanghai Lily, as Dietrich is called, reacts to the contempt others show with a jaded, amused sense of irony, which she retains even when she runs into a former lover, Donald Harvey, a British officer and military doctor. “It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily,” is her now-famous remark, delivered not as a confession but as a simple statement of fact. Harvey is offended, yet he must admit that she is more beautiful than ever.

A civil war is raging in China, and the train is taken over by rebels. When the passengers are summoned to the commander of the revolutionary army, they realize that he is one of their fellow passengers. Mister Chang has exchanged his white suit for a uniform. He needs a hostage, and to find the right one, he subjects the passengers to an interrogation. These seemingly honorable travelers all have something to hide. Under interrogation, Shanghai Lily states that she has been living in China for eight years. When Chang tries to seduce her, Harvey, who has overheard everything, breaks down the door and knocks Chang to the floor. After this proof of Harvey’s love, Lily’s irony turns dead serious. To protect Harvey, she is willing to sacrifice herself for him and become Chang’s lover. In a final dramatic sequence of shots in the train, Dietrich shows what she has learned. During the night, she leaves her cabin wearing a black lace negligee adorned with feathers. The narrow corridor of the clattering train is her catwalk. The camera follows her until she gets to Harvey’s door. Before she knocks, von Sternberg shows his lover in all her splendor. In this moment, she seems to belong to him alone. He desires her with his camera gaze. Love conquers all in Shanghai Express, and Donald Harvey and Shanghai Lily are reunited as a couple.

The exotic milieu that von Sternberg constructed in the California desert highlights Dietrich’s beauty and distinctiveness. She glides through the movie like an aristocratic black swan. Dietrich knows how to show her feather boas, lace panties, veils, gloves, furs, and silk to their best advantage and comes off as one unending enticement, even though she reveals neither leg nor bosom. Shanghai Lily is a beautiful, cynical plaything who plays with the men—not the other way around. However, her lovely façade is the masquerade of a dead woman. In Shanghai Express, von Sternberg shows a new variant of the story of the demimondaine with a big heart.

The men of honor in uniform turn out to be con artists, cowards, or sadists. The supposedly disreputable woman, by contrast, proves to be big-hearted and brave. Dietrich remained true to the role of the brave adventuress and lover: Amy Jolly follows her lover into the desert, Marie Kolverer is shot for saving a man she may have loved, and Shanghai Lily is willing to sacrifice herself for a man who is oblivious to her love.

Shanghai Express was Dietrich’s third Hollywood motion picture. Little by little, she was learning how the movie business worked. When she was filming, she was “like a soldier going into battle.”³⁷ She was ready to leave for the studio before five in the morning, with her daughter Maria in tow. They drove through the cold streets of the desert town in silence. Dietrich always brought a large number of lemons with her to fight her queasiness. She made the driver stop several times along the way so that she could vomit at the side of the road. Once they had passed through the Paramount gate, the preparations for the shoot followed a prescribed path. Dietrich was the first to enter her dressing room, followed by Maria and a group of assistants. She switched on the lights, still silent and utterly focused on the transformation ahead. She took off her clothes, and Maria handed her the makeup smock. Dietrich tied the cloth belt tightly around her waist, then her men’s oxfords were untied for her and she put on her open-back slippers. Maria placed “the green tin of Lucky Strikes with the gold Dunhill lighter by the large glass ashtray, next to the dish with the marabou powder puffs.”³⁸ The coffee was served with cream in a Meissen cup. Dietrich’s hair was styled and makeup applied to her weary face. Then she took a last puff of her cigarette before her lipstick was added. The hairpieces, which were perfectly coordinated to her hair color, were secured in place with the “Westmore twist—a sort of half-hitch with a straight hairpin that just missed penetrating the skull.”³⁹ By this point she was presumably completely awake, just in time for the arrival of the wardrobe girls to put on the costume she needed for that day. Dietrich waited until everything was assembled. When she called out “Let’s go!” the lights were turned off, the door was locked, and they went off to the set. She brought along five thermoses filled with homemade soups and German coffee. She was ready to work with her creator.⁴⁰

Her costumes for Shanghai Express were more extravagant than for any of her previous movies. Travis Banton, her costume designer from Texas, created true masterpieces of visual eroticism for her.⁴¹ Banton, who was always exquisitely dressed, had an athletic build and a peasant face. Once a year he made a shopping trip to Paris. He had the gloves, suitcases, and handbags for Shanghai Express fashioned by Hermès. His studio was furnished with a lavish array of antiques and paintings. Dietrich spent many hours there standing in front of the mirror. Every studio came equipped with a small room with a couch for the exhausted stars to take a rest, but Dietrich had the stamina and discipline to hold out without using it. Since she was always on a diet, there was no need for meal breaks.

When Dietrich arrived in Hollywood, there was a set of procedures in place designed to turn a roly-poly girl from Berlin into a Hollywood goddess. Hair dying; plastic surgery; calisthenics; employing cosmetic tricks such as “opening up” the eyes by shifting the eyebrows; and taking instruction in speech, dance, walking, and singing were standard practice for every woman who aspired to stardom. Dietrich’s transformation was extraordinarily successful. She worked on her makeover with determination and discipline.

However, Hollywood also made demands that were not easy to live up to even for Dietrich, specifically those pertaining to manners and morality. Riza von Sternberg, who had no intention of resigning herself to the fact that her husband was in love with another actress, made Dietrich’s life difficult. Riza knew, of course, that her accusation of Dietrich’s immoral conduct was the best means to get her out of the way and to impede any future work with von Sternberg. A scandal could be deadly. Studio bosses were not pleased when their stars violated the stipulated moral principles. The so-called Hays Code specified how long a kiss could last, how long a skirt could be, and what expressions could be used.⁴² The stars’ personal lives were not spared from this puritanical zeal, and there were plenty of newspapers just waiting to exploit an affair and ruin a career. Dietrich was well aware of this. Shortly after her return from Europe, she sent a cable to Rudi in Paris:

SINCE YOUR PRESENCE HERE WOULD GREATLY HELP ME IN MATTERS OF PUBLICITY WITH TRIAL OF FRAU STERNBERG AGAINST ME CABLE ME EARLIEST TIME YOU ARE FREE THERE IF THEY DENY YOU VACATION I DEMAND VACATION TIME FROM LASKY AS SOON AS I HAVE ASSIGNMENT FROM YOU DON’T TELL ANYONE DETAILS ANSWER SOON YOUR MUTTI.⁴³

He does not seem to have been very enthusiastic about the prospect of playing the role of the husband; her next cable made her seem peeved:

YOUR COMING EARLY AUGUST HAS LITTLE PURPOSE I AM WORKING THEN AND THE PRESS SCANDAL IS OVER YOUR VISIT DELIGHTS US ANY TIME BUT IF YOU WANT TO HELP ME YOU HAVE TO COME NOW ANSWER IMMEDIATELY IF THAT IS POSSIBLE AND HOW MUCH MONEY YOU NEED MILLION KISSES MUTTIKATER.⁴⁴

Now Rudi seems to have noticed that the situation was dire. Marlene had already given him travel instructions in an earlier letter: “You fly to Cherbourg, take 4 days to cross the ocean, then 4 days by train, and you’ll be with us.”⁴⁵

Dietrich waited for him in Pasadena, along with Maria and von Sternberg. Rudi must have been amazed at the villa, the pool, the blue sky, the Rolls Royce, and the sun that shone every day. A photograph shows the expanded nuclear family, Dietrich wearing a tie, hat, and sports jacket; Maria with her arms around her parents’ shoulders; Rudi; and next to him von Sternberg, who has linked arms with Rudi. The men are wearing white suits, the child a white dress, and Dietrich a white skirt. They are gazing expectantly into their future. A few weeks later, Sieber returned to Europe. He had done his duty; everyone saw that Dietrich, true to her claim, really did have a husband.

In Hollywood, the story ran its course. Riza got a substantial settlement from the divorce, and Dietrich filmed her next movie with von Sternberg. Major advertising campaigns and two movies in three years made the pair well-known to the American moviegoer. She immersed herself in dubbing her films, with an eye to her career in Europe. Sieber at Paramount Studios in Paris helped her behind the scenes. On September 12, she sent him this transatlantic order: PLEASE IMMEDIATELY LISTEN TO FRENCH VERSION OF MOROCCO WITH MY EARS AND CABLE HOW YOU LIKED IT KISSES MUTTIKATER. She wanted him to tell her every detail of what was being said about her in Europe. However, Rudi did not write to her often. Her telegrams in the period before Christmas of 1931 grew briefer and briefer. Sometimes she sent him a million kisses, other times she wrote that she was working night and day, and still other times, she asked only why he was not replying, even though she was paying for the telegrams. She could travel to Europe and earn money, she wrote him, because her next shoot in Hollywood was not scheduled to begin until March. He did not reply. A few days later, she sent him a telegram with the message that she would not be coming to Paris, which meant that she had no source of income until mid-February. When her mother also asked her in early December to invest money in Berlin, she asked Rudi to take care of that. A SUM LIKE THAT NOT EASY TO EARN NO ONE NOW INVESTS MONEY IN EUROPE IF I DO THAN ONLY FOR MUTTI CERTAINLY NOT GOOD PLACE FOR MY MONEY.⁴⁶ Until the next time she got paid, she borrowed money from von Sternberg. He, in turn, had to sell securities in order to stay solvent. When she had money, she spent it. Dietrich could not work with a budget; Rudi saw to these unpleasant matters.

On October 9, Morocco premiered at the Gloria Palace in Berlin. Her old friend, the screenwriter Walter Reisch, wrote to her: “My dear and admired lady! . . . The press and intelligentsia really liked your ‘Morocco movie.’ The masses were thrown off by the dialogue and bold theme. . . . Incidentally, congratulations are in order for you, now that you really don’t have to live here. A beautiful woman is out of place here these days. You belong in the land of the sun!”⁴⁷ Dietrich was sure to have appreciated her friend’s compliments, but his description of the situation in Berlin sounded alarming: “The situation here is still so unsettled that it is almost pointless to draw up a schedule for anything past five in the afternoon. Every half hour brings a new change to the program. Exchange embargo, emergency decree, production cuts—catchwords that are governing the moment.”⁴⁸ The political situation had everyone on tenterhooks, and the personal sphere diminished in importance. Young people regarded uniforms as the promise of a better future. Assets kept declining as unemployment rose; corruption and depravity continued under Brüning. The name “Hitler” came up with increasing frequency. When Dietrich recalled the newspaper photographs of this bumbling man in garish clothing with bulbous facial features and a thick dog whip, she knew why Reisch said that a beautiful woman was out of place in Berlin.

Should she go to Europe at all?

TELL ME DEAR WHETHER I OUGHT TO STAY HERE IN VIEW OF SITUATION GERMANY . . . GET IDEA THAT VACATION BERLIN CANNOT BE ENJOYABLE AND I COULD NOT TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR LOSS OF MONEY YOU HAVE BETTER OVERVIEW OF SITUATION FROM THERE AND CAN GIVE ADVICE KISSES MUTTIKATER.⁴⁹

Sieber knew from Tamara, who visited her family in Berlin from time to time, how depressing the situation was there. She wrote, “It is quite miserable in Berlin . . . everyone has left and those who have stayed are in a bad mood. After Paris, Berlin is so dead. . . . There is nothing to do here (as far as business goes). No film. Everything dead. . . . It is very bad.”⁵⁰ Sieber advised Dietrich not to come. He wanted to spare her this gloomy atmosphere in Berlin.

Some of the telegrams and letters that went back and forth between Paris and Los Angeles were about Dietrich’s need to replenish her supply of stockings, gloves, literature, suntan lotion, medicine, and children’s books. Sieber knew everything about her clothing preferences and measurements, right down to her lingerie, and he whizzed through Paris to locate the items she needed.

The United States was mired in an economic crisis and a crisis of confidence, which many regarded as an acute threat to their existence. After criss-crossing the country, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic candidate for president, reported that he had looked into the faces of thousands of Americans: “They have the frightened look of lost children.” He promised people a return to normality with the campaign slogan: “Happy days are here again.” Hollywood eagerly echoed this sentiment. In the presidential election year, and against the backdrop of the Great Depression, Dietrich and von Sternberg made a movie that differed strikingly from her others. Blonde Venus is set in the United States and highlights the atmosphere of this period in history. Dietrich plays the role of a mother.⁵¹ A great many conflicts flared up in the ensuing months about the various screenplay versions, the director, the star, and the artistic direction of Paramount Studios. By the end of 1931, Paramount was experiencing serious difficulties in the turbulence of the Great Depression and could not afford a flop. The studio pinned its hopes on Dietrich and von Sternberg. Letters, telegrams, and telephone calls went back and forth between the film bosses, with frantic deliberations as to how one could bring about a success of the Dietrich and von Sternberg duo, and they ultimately came up with the idea of a story of a mother. B. P. Schulberg, the production chief at Paramount, liked the idea of presenting Dietrich as a loving mother, as he stated in a telegram to his colleague Emanuel Cohen:

THIS STORY COMBINES EVERY ELEMENT OF DRAMATIC INTEREST THAT COULD POSSIBLY BE CROWDED INTO A DIETRICH SUBJECT GIVING HER A STRONG EMOTIONAL SYMPATHETIC ROLE THAT IS FAR REMOVED FROM ANYTHING SHE HAS YET DONE AND SHOULD THEREFORE BE WELCOME RELIEF AT SAME TIME GIVING HER OPPORTUNITY TO SING DRESS SMARTLY AND BE GLITTERING STAGE PERSONALITY WITH WHICH SHE CAPTURED PUBLIC IN BOTH MOROCCO AND BLUE ANGEL.⁵²

However, it was not easy to implement this plan. Power struggles within Paramount, strict censorship regulations, and profit seeking stood in the way of a unified approach. Schulberg himself had to leave in the course of the year, and von Sternberg also tried to walk away from Paramount before the shooting even began. He did not want to film the script that had been presented to him in revised form. Von Sternberg provided this terse summary of a war of nerves that dragged on for months: “Miss Dietrich also left, refusing to work with anyone else, and I was forced to return, as we were both under contract.”⁵³

On May 26, filming of Blonde Venus began at long last, with Dietrich playing a German woman named Helen who has married an American chemist, Edward Faraday. Faraday has lost his job in the Depression and is seriously ill as well. They live in New York with their five-year-old son, Johnny. Helen, a former cabaret singer, goes back to her profession against her husband’s wishes. In her search for employment, she has to present herself in multiple guises and under several different names, and has to outshine innumerable competitors. Everyone is on the quest for a job. Von Sternberg again portrayed Dietrich as a nightclub singer. The men are after her, and she chooses the best of them, Nick Townsend (played by Cary Grant), to be a lover. He gives her money to finance a cure for her husband’s medical condition. When her husband finds out about the affair, a battle for the child ensues. Helen flees, and Faraday has the police chase her around the country. The people Helen meets are tough and pitiless. While on the run through America, she goes to rack and ruin and winds up as a homeless boozer with tattered clothing and crude manners. Many Americans feared ending up that way. When she has hit rock bottom, she gives up. She stays behind at some godforsaken train station in shabby clothes, while her husband leaves with their son. After experiencing a meteoric rise as a singer in Paris, Helen returns to New York and asks her husband to take her back.

In 1932, when it had become clear that the big party in the United States was over, Dietrich’s European approach to motherhood went quite well with the new domesticity. People no longer headed out to clubs, bars, or restaurants for entertainment, but instead discovered the joys of parlor games they could play at home. Puzzles, bridge, and checkers gained in popularity. Dietrich played the role of mother both lovingly and matter-of-factly. When Helen leaves for her first performance and gives Edward, who is standing around helplessly, quick instructions for making dinner and putting their son to bed while she is memorizing her role and packing her bags, she is portraying a situation that working mothers everywhere have faced. Dietrich’s fierce commitment to motherhood is strikingly absent from the public’s perception of her. She played Helen Faraday as a mother who has remained a desirable woman. At that time only she could do that. As a housewife, she wore white blouses, white aprons, and black skirts, but also form-fitting, fur-trimmed coats. As a singer and a lover, she is draped in flowing, seductive robes, or she makes her appearance in a white tailcoat and a top hat. Once again, Dietrich plays the woman who is passionately in love, but here the object of her love is neither the offended husband nor the debonair lover; it is her son. Posing as an androgynous femme fatale serves only to mask her disappointment in love. Besides a mother, wife, lover, and singer, Dietrich in this movie is also a German. She has to tell Johnny again and again how she and his father first met: “It was springtime in Germany . . .” In the evening, she sings him German songs, such as “Leise zieht durch mein Gemüt” and “Ein Männlein steht im Walde.” In this movie, made in 1932, Germany is the country in which American men can fall in love with beautiful German nymphs on warm spring evenings and in which live famous researchers who can cure what ails you.

However, the news Dietrich was hearing from Berlin at the beginning of the new year did not bode well. The showing of Dishonored in Berlin had been disrupted. Walter Reisch did not ascribe much value to these actions.

Wonderful Marlene! I have just come from your film X 27. Unfortunately—or should I say thank goodness—I did not get tickets for the premiere, because I would surely have had to tussle with a good many rowdies. To get right to the point: I find the movie splendid! The ruckus and scandals are surely the work of some rowdies who see any premiere around the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church as an opportunity to attract attention. . . . Apart from them, everyone is unanimous: Marlene’s best performance as an actress. Von Sternberg’s sparkling, lush, colorful, dramatic, stirring production. By the way, it has been sold out every time so far. . . . Moving on to another subject: many sincere thanks for your lovely letter; I was triply delighted by every single line, I am quite upset about your complaining that you don’t like it over there anymore! Your yearning for Europe is totally incomprehensible for us over here! Anyone here who knows about politics, economic and social collapse, etc. has no understanding whatsoever for a yearning for Europe.⁵⁴

In the same month, Dietrich got a request from Rudi and Josefine to grant them power of attorney over her assets. They feared economic decline and wanted to ensure that they had enough to live on. The letters and telegrams that went back and forth over the next few months between Paris, Berlin, and Los Angeles show how woefully incapable each side was of understanding the other. In 1932, Dietrich had no secure source of income and was feeling uneasy among the sharks of Hollywood, although Rudi and Josefine figured she was rich and carefree. In November 1931, she had been nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actress for her role as Amy Jolly in Morocco, and von Sternberg had been nominated as Best Director. Neither had won. This would be Dietrich’s only Oscar nomination.

Then a new crisis drove her to the brink of insanity. On March 1, the twenty-month-old baby of the aviator Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped from his parents’ home. The Hollywood stars feared for the safety of their children. Dietrich received an extortion letter with a threat to kidnap Maria. She was partway through filming Blonde Venus and was utterly incapable of thinking clearly. Every morning she took Maria to the studio with her, and at night, Maria was protected by her mother’s male friends. One night, Maria recalled, “I found von Sternberg on the floor by my bed, revolver ready, fast asleep. Another night, Chevalier, equally armed and ready, snoring musically.⁵⁵ When Rudi Sieber came, Dietrich arranged for him to be guarded by two FBI officers, and bars were installed on all the doors and windows of her house. She threatened to leave the United States, but that went against everyone else’s interests. Von Sternberg wanted to keep Dietrich by his side, and Sieber was quite content to live in Paris without his wife. In the end, everything stayed as it was, and Dietrich remained in Hollywood. Where else could she go, anyway?

Paramount was considered the American film studio in Europe. European stars such as Emil Jannings, Ernst Lubitsch, Marlene Dietrich, Sergei Eisenstein, and Maurice Chevalier were under contract with Paramount. In her relationship with Chevalier, Dietrich tried to keep her memory of Europe alive and to fight off her homesickness. He was thirteen years older than Dietrich, had been a street urchin in Paris, then became a revue star after the war. His elegant clothing—suit, straw hat, and bow tie—was his trademark. Even in his love letters to Dietrich, he could not stop playing the charming Frenchman. Chevalier called Dietrich “ma grande aimée, ma femme, ma grande.” He gave no evidence of originality in his communication with her, but rather wallowed in platitudes about love. JE PENSE A TOI SANS CESSE ET TU ES ENCORE DANS MES BRAS.⁵⁶ By the fourth letter, this kind of talk had become wearying. Chevalier was too guileless to hold Dietrich’s interest. It is easy to picture the two enjoying a good laugh about the Americans, singing together, or rhapsodizing about Paris. Chevalier met up with Sieber in Paris, and as usual, Sieber got along famously with his wife’s lover. Their topic of conversation was, of course, Dietrich. These encounters with Forst, Chevalier, von Sternberg, and the rest kept Sieber well informed as to the state of Dietrich’s relationships with her current lovers. Not only did he have a complete picture of her finances, but he also knew his way around her love life. He retained a vestige of power over her. Almost every second telegram—the longer she was away, the fewer letters they exchanged—contained his request for money. PLEASE MUTTI SEND MONEY I NEED IT MILLION KISSES FOREVER PAPA.⁵⁷

In September, Dietrich repeatedly asked Rudi how the situation was in Germany, and whether he would advise her to come. I UNDERSTAND YOU SO WELL BUT IF I SHALL ADVISE YOU SHOULDN’T GO TO GERMANY NOW POLITICAL SITUATION TERRIBLE NEW ELECTIONS DANGER OF CITIZEN WAR.⁵⁸ Her friends did not appear to be faring well, and she heard that Marcellus Schiffer had taken his own life. Margo Lion had left Berlin and moved to Paris.

Dietrich took Rudi’s advice and stayed in Hollywood with Maria. Blonde Venus came to movie theaters in late September. The American critics felt that the time had come to lash out at von Sternberg and his star. “His latest movie, The Blonde Venus, is perhaps the worst ever made. In it all Sternberg’s gifts have turned sour. The photography is definitely ‘arty’—a nauseating blend of hazy light, soft focus, over-blacks and over-whites, with each shot so obviously ‘composed’ as to be painful.”⁵⁹ None of the participants had really wanted to make this movie in the first place, and no one was surprised when it flopped. Dietrich and von Sternberg were no longer regarded as an artistic couple who stood for success. With all the external pressure they were facing, the intervals between their spats became briefer and briefer. He was considered difficult because he felt superior to everyone else, and she supposedly always obeyed him. They had to give careful thought to any future collaboration. Von Sternberg wrote matter-of-factly that after their fifth movie together, he had finally persuaded her to work with a different director.

Von Sternberg traveled to the West Indies to film a hurricane. He and Dietrich were taking a break from each other. Marlene asked Rudi how Blonde Venus was received in Berlin, and he told her that even in the third week it was still completely sold out. VENUS BERLIN BIG SUCCESS ALL CRITICS FANTASTIC FOR YOU ALSO MARVELOUS FOR JO.⁶⁰ However, this positive reception does not seem to have inspired her to continue making movies. In early December she asked Rudi impatiently when he would finally come to them, and she contemplated going back to Europe with him: HOPE TO GET AWAY WITHOUT MAKING PICTURE CABLE AT ONCE MILLION KISSES MUTTIKATER.⁶¹

The year 1933 began on a note of trouble. Dietrich did not show up for work, and Paramount sued her for breach of contract. She was finally pressured into meeting her new director. A photograph of Dietrich with Rouben Mamoulian shows how very different they were. He looked as though he cared only about philosophical issues, while she had donned a glamorous get-up to gain attention. However, the two of them got along. She liked the fact that he accepted her as she was. The film they would be working on together for Paramount had been adapted from Hermann Sudermann’s novel Song of Songs. Dietrich recited her little piece about how she, like every German girl, loved and cherished this novel. A telegram from von Sternberg, who was back in Berlin in late January 1933, shows that she was quite happy to have gained Mamoulian as an admirer. DEAREST JUST GOT YOUR FIRST LETTER THANKS A MILLION NOW YOUR TELEGRAMS FROM WHICH I GATHER THAT YOU ARE HAPPY AGAIN AND DELIGHTED BECAUSE OF ROUBEN WHOSE ENTHUSIASM IS LIKE MINE BACK THEN . . . AM DELIGHTED THAT YOU ARE NOT SUFFERING. . . .⁶²

Nine days later Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany, and the National Socialists felt as though they were “in a fairy tale,” as Joseph Goebbels declared.⁶³ Dietrich’s correspondence with both her American lover and her husband barely mentioned Hitler at first. Von Sternberg found Berlin unchanged in the three years that had passed since The Blue Angel. He stopped off there to have dinner with Alfred Hugenberg. When he went on to Vienna the next morning, the cab that drove him to the airport was delayed in front of the burning Reichstag. In Paris he met with Sieber, who telegraphed to Dietrich that he and von Sternberg talked over their problems, most likely in regard to her staying in the United States. (In February 1932, she had stated in an interview with an American newspaper that she was thinking of returning to Germany, but nothing came of that idea.) By the time von Sternberg was sitting in the taxi watching the Reichstag burn, he must have realized that the National Socialist takeover would also impinge on their plans, but in late March, Rudi was still lighthearted: HAPPY NOTHING SERIOUS HAPPENED ARE YOU WELL AGAIN . . . MILLION KISSES LOVE YOU PAPA.⁶⁴

Dietrich was feeling lonely in Hollywood. Once she started shooting the film with Mamoulian, she came to appreciate what she had had with Jo.

EVERYBODY EXCITED OVER MY SO CALLED ACTING HAVE NO DIFFICULTIES WHATSOEVER MAMOULIAN LOVES EVERYTHING I SAY AND DO TWO TAKES OF EACH SCENE THE LAST TIMES WITH JO SEEM TO BE A BAD DREAM ALTHOUGH THE INSPIRED ATMOSPHERE IS MISSING AND I SEE NOW MORE THAN EVER HOW FAR ABOVE EVERYBODY HE IS.⁶⁵

Maria watched her mother memorizing her lines for the first time. In von Sternberg’s view, scripts existed only for the studio bosses. Dietrich relied on his genius and knew that he would tell her in good time what needed to be done. She did not consider Mamoulian a genius, so she learned her lines by heart.

Song of Songs was the movie in which Dietrich sang “Heidenröslein” and “Johnny.” The song repertoire replicates the range of her role. She begins as the innocent young woman from the country, falls in love with a young artist in Berlin, is paired off with a sadistic baron in Pomerania, and eventually winds up as a cynical sensualist. The filming was completed by early May, and Dietrich had time off. She wanted to take Maria to Europe; the only question was—Berlin or Paris? She knew from Sieber that her mother was expecting her in Berlin. Josefine von Losch was not alarmed about the political events. Like most Germans, she believed that this was none of her concern. RADICAL UPHEAVALS NO MATTER TO US NEWSPAPER REPORTS SURELY EXAGGERATE EVERYTHING ALL WELL HUGS MUTTI.⁶⁶ But Sieber sounded a note of caution. He advised her to travel with a French ship and to have a new American contract in her pocket before setting foot on German soil. She was still quite popular in Germany, and in April of the previous year, the premiere of Shanghai Express had sold out.

SHANGHAI EXPRESS GREATEST SUCCESS IN YEARS DAILY THREE SHOWINGS SOLD OUT SATURDAY FORCED TO TURN AWAY ATTENDEES WITH TRAFFIC PATROL NIGHT PERFORMANCE.⁶⁷

Dietrich wanted to leave the United States without delay, but where was she to go? Should she consider Berlin after all?

The letters and telegrams from the spring of 1933 convey the impression that Dietrich was on the run. Her options were unappealing: Germany had Hitler, and Paris the wife of Maurice Chevalier. Should she take a German or a French ship? Where should she disembark? What should she say, and in what language? On May 8, Rudi sent her a clear message:

SITUATION BERLIN TERRIBLE EVERYBODY ADVISES AGAINST YOU GOING STOP EVEN EDI THE NAZI AFRAID OF MOB SCENES MOST BARS ARE CLOSED STOP CINEMAS IMPOSSIBLE STREET EMPTY ALL JEWS FROM PARAMOUNT BERLIN HAVE BEEN MOVED TO PARIS VIA VIENNA STOP I EXPECT YOU WITH MUTTI CHERBOURG . . . LATER SWITZERLAND OR TYROL GOT PHOTOS FANTASTIC WONDERFUL I WAIT FOR YOU LONGING KISSES PAPA.⁶⁸

Dietrich was seeking refuge with her husband. The telegrams she sent him while she traveled to Europe were filled with the feelings of loneliness she so dreaded, and her longing for him. By the time of her arrival in Cherbourg, she was at the end of her rope. Her child was seasick, and she had not slept for three nights.

The photograph of their arrival in Paris shows her making a regal entrance. Dietrich is shielding her eyes from the curious onlookers with dark sunglasses. The expression on her face reveals that she knows everyone’s eyes are on her. She is flanked by Sieber and Marcel Boursier, who made the preparations for her stay. Maria is not in the picture. The men seem barely able to keep up with Dietrich. These are the most dynamic photographs of her. She had finally gotten away from Hollywood. The fact that she was wearing men’s clothing—suit, shirt and tie, loose coat, and beret—created a sensation in Europe.⁶⁹

Dietrich had her suits, tuxedos, slacks, and sports jackets made by traditional men’s tailors. She loved this finely detailed and practical clothing, which showed her good posture to best advantage and had added subtle touches of femininity. Red wool slacks, buttoned on the side like sailor trousers, were tailored in a standard men’s cut, but the waistband was lined with a floral strip. A piece of fabric with typewritten text sown into the slacks read: “Mr. Marlene Dietrich. Date: November 1932, Watson & Son Tailors, Hollywood, California.” The fabric of her tuxedo is dark, thick, and heavy; only a woman with a commanding presence would not be overwhelmed by this massive piece of clothing. In addition to stylish camisoles and seductive lace panties, her collection of underwear also included monogrammed silk boxer shorts with an open fly.

Of course there was work awaiting her in Paris as well. She oversaw the dubbing of Song of Songs and in the process got to watch her husband at work. And how did Rudi cope with the delicate situation that his wife, daughter, and lover were all in Paris? His daughter recalled, “Like many ineffectual men, he was a tyrant in those categories in which he could get away with it. . . . Restaurants were his favorite arena to play Nero in, his famous wife, the type-cast Christian. With her he always chose a public place for his tantrums and toward people who couldn’t talk back. Employees feared for their jobs, establishments the loss of Dietrich’s patronage. Tami, I, and [the dog] Teddy just feared—period.”⁷⁰ Her mother ignored these outbursts. This kind of behavior was ridiculous for someone like him at a place like Paramount, and Dietrich knew it. She felt that she owed it to Sieber to let him indulge in these scenes in her presence in exchange for his agreeing to play his role as the husband. She also paid for his cashmere jackets, Cartier cigarette lighters, and tweed suits. Dietrich’s earnings enabled him to lead a life of luxury.

It took no more than a few short months after the National Socialists came to power for her sympathies to become clear to all. Her suite in the Hotel George V would become a familiar address for emigrants in the 1930s. Dietrich treated them to meals, gave them money, got them work, and paid for their travel to America. Janet Flanner remarked on her cordial reception by the Parisians: “She is the sweet pepper that brings crowds to the modest Hungarian restaurant on the Rue de Surène where she customarily dines; she is the bitters at fashionable cocktail parties only when she fails to appear. . . . She speaks excellent French, deports herself modestly. . . . Fräulein Dietrich is the first foreign female personality Paris society has fallen in love with in years.”⁷¹

In September, Dietrich and Maria went back to America. Dietrich shuddered at the thought of the emptiness that awaited her there. Von Sternberg had rented an even more luxurious villa for her in an even wealthier neighborhood. He wanted only the best for her. In addition to the Rolls Royce, he gave her a sapphire ring, rhinestones, malachite, lapis lazuli, and a gold cigarette case with the inscription: “Marlene Dietrich / woman, mother, and actress like no other, Josef von Sternberg.”

Her trip to Europe had been doubly fraught, with the new regime in Germany and the many quarrels she had had with von Sternberg. He was head over heels in love with her, and she could not muster up the courage to break off their relationship because nobody could put her in the limelight better than he. In May, von Sternberg had sent her a love telegram nearly every day. On May 10, he wrote: MY DEAR GODDESS EVERYTHING IS SO EMPTY AGAIN AND I AM BURNING UP WITH LONGING AND LOVE . . . ALL MY THOUGHTS AND DREAMS ARE WITH YOU JO; a telegram sent the following week expressed similar sentiments: WOULD LOVE TO THROW AWAY THE WHOLE KIT AND CABOODLE AND FLY TO YOU . . . I MISS YOU WITH EVERY THOUGHT AND LOVE YOU MORE AND MORE EVERY SECOND YOU INCOMPARABLE WOMAN AND MOST BEAUTIFUL CREATION.⁷² He knew that the woman he worshipped would be getting together with her husband and her lovers. Just hours after sending off a telegram to her, he fretted that she would not reply and posted declarations of love to her on ships and trains, recalling experiences they had shared and trying to make plans to see her again.

When the cameras were off, he was submissive to her, but when they were turned back on, he expected her to bow to his wishes. In his view, actors were living props and he could make them do whatever he had in mind, since it was the director who imbued the actors’ work with meaning. Humiliation and praise were von Sternberg’s educational tools, and he insisted on complete silence on the set.⁷³ He made everyone take off their wristwatches because the ticking disturbed him. Von Sternberg’s tyranny was the perfect complement to Dietrich’s mechanical working method. She did precisely what he asked of her. She did not ask a lot of questions; she obeyed. She needed his instructions and his eyes on her to be able to act; both reassured her. No matter what he demanded of her, she complied with his wishes. She did not tolerate complaints, least of all from herself, although von Sternberg had no compunction about going to extremes.

While they were shooting her next movie, The Scarlet Empress, she had to ring the cathedral bell to proclaim her victory. To simulate the ringing of the huge bell, the thick pull rope had been rigged on counterlevered pulleys and weighted with sandbags. A massive mahogany crucifix rimmed in steel was attached to the end of the rope to keep it hanging taut. As she pulled on the rope, stretching her entire body up high then bringing it down, all the way to her knees, the crucifix slammed against the inside of her thighs, and down her calves. Over and over she repeated this action, until she had executed the required eight strokes. She must have been pulling twenty pounds of dead weight with each motion, in full resplendent uniform complete with cavalry shako and dangling regimental sword.⁷⁴

Von Sternberg made her repeat this scene fifty times, knowing full well that she would not complain. That was the power he still had over her. When her dressing room attendant and Maria helped her off with her costume, they saw that her inner thighs were bleeding. The sharp metal edges of the crucifix had lacerated her. Dietrich ordered them to shut the door, then she poured alcohol over the wounds. Maria, who was standing next to her, sensed the searing pain, but her mother did not even flinch. She was driven home, then she cooked Jo’s favorite dinner and limped across the dining room to serve it to him. He spent the night there, and over breakfast she thanked him for helping her to play the scene just the way he wanted it. Von Sternberg asserted until the end of his life that “Miss Dietrich” was the best assistant he had ever had.

Ever since they made their first film together, she had been his pupil. Von Sternberg and Dietrich were highly professional, technophile perfectionists. They turned the production process into a complex, sensual, experimental arrangement. Decades later, when she recalled how he shone a light on her for the first time, she described a moment of pure eroticism: “Never will I forget the wonderful moment when I climbed up to the set, a dark and cave-like set where he stood in the dim light of a single bulb. Lonely? Not really. A strange mixture, which I would get to know. He sent away everyone who was standing near me, but he allowed me to stay while he set up the lighting for the scene. . . . The voice of the lord who created the visions of light and shadow and transformed the bleak, bare set into a painting suffused in a vibrant, magic light.”⁷⁵ He never touched her while they were shooting, and always spoke to her in German. If other members of the crew wanted to communicate something to her, they had to come to him.⁷⁶ Dietrich was keenly observant and unfailingly willing to carry out his orders without a fuss. She showed him what could and could not be depicted, and how a woman would act in a given situation. His name and her look formed an everlasting merger.

In the summer of 1933, von Sternberg was nervously awaiting her return to Hollywood. When it became clear that she would be staying on longer, he asked if he could come to her.

MAY I JOIN YOU FOR A COUPLE OF WEEKS IT WOULD BE INEXPRESSIBLE HAPPINESS FOR ME COULD BE IN PARIS IN TWO WEEKS OR ANYWHERE IF YOU DON’T WANT IT I WILL DEFER TO YOU AND WORSHIP YOU FROM AFAR BUT FOR ME IT WOULD BE THE FAIRY TALE I’VE LONGED FOR.⁷⁷

Dietrich did not want to have him in Europe. She already had her hands full with her husband, lover, daughter, mother, sister, and nephews. Von Sternberg wooed her with a film project. Hadn’t she always wanted to play Catherine the Great? In mid-July, he was overjoyed to be able to fulfill her wish. Both Dietrich and Paramount jumped at the prospect. He had succeeded in luring her back to his set.

Right from the start, there was something immoderate and imperious about The Scarlet Empress. Von Sternberg took charge of nearly every aspect of this movie; he even composed and conducted parts of the soundtrack. He was not interested in documentary fidelity; the idea was to use a historical model as a springboard for his artistic fantasy. The rooms in the Kremlin are gloomy and cluttered with Byzantine ornaments, religious symbols, and horrid figurines. The baroque opulence arouses claustrophobic fears. These rooms are the stuff of nightmares. They do not have human dimensions, but rather seem to be made for giants. Candles flicker everywhere and cast eerie shadows onto the walls. The few lighthearted moments in the movie are set in Germany, Catherine’s birthplace. The child princess, Sophia Frederica, is played by Dietrich’s daughter, Maria. In the opening scene, she is lying in bed under a portrait of Frederick the Great. Marlene Dietrich plays the fourteen-year-old princess and the adult Catherine. Not only was she too old for the role of the adolescent, but she was ill-suited to the role of an innocent girl. Princess Sophia’s carefree youth comes to an end when the king decrees that she is to marry the Grand Duke of Russia. His envoy, Prince Alexei, escorts Sophia to the impenetrable world of the Kremlin. The tsarina, who speaks and acts like a fishwife, has Sophia checked right there and then to establish whether she is fertile. When Sophia meets her fiancé, she realizes why that is so important: Grand Duke Peter is out of his mind. He loves toy soldiers and executions. Sophia’s husband-to-be is a savage simpleton. When she first lays eyes on her bridegroom, pure horror is written all over her face. Sophia’s role is to mitigate the insanity that inbreeding has spread through the Russian dynasty. She is being set up to wed an idiot and become a “brood mare.” Von Sternberg filmed the wedding ceremony without sound. Catherine is trapped in eerie splendor. The tsarina savors the wedding as a personal triumph, the bridegroom goes through the ceremony with a foolish grin on his face, and the bride is gripped with fear. Catherine’s lovely, pale face is hidden behind a veil, and there is a candle in front of her mouth, flickering from her rapid breathing. In just a few more minutes, she will give her hand in marriage to Peter, thus sealing her fate. Catherine realizes what she needs to do when she discovers that the tsarina secretly has lovers brought to her, and soon thereafter, Catherine gets pregnant by a dapper officer and gives birth to the desired successor to the throne.

As the mother of the future tsar, she wields great power. Catherine conquers the army with sex. The officers are at her beck and call; she takes one after the other at random to be her lover. In the end, she wins out over Tsar Peter, who has established a reign of terror after his mother’s death. Catherine leads the procession of the soldiers astride a white horse, wearing a white Cossack uniform. Tsar Peter is forcibly removed from office and killed. Tsarina Catherine the Great is exultant as she rings the bells, but her laughter twists her face into a grotesque grimace at the moment of her supreme triumph.

The Scarlet Empress tracks the transformation of a well-behaved young princess from the German countryside into a coldblooded, sex-crazed ruler of a world empire. The court of the Russian tsar was brimming over with debauchery, greed, cruelty, and perversion. Catherine becomes schooled in lies, humiliations, and scheming. Once she has freed herself from her romantic notions of love and Protestant values, she devotes herself to sexual pleasure, picking out her lovers from among the men in uniform. There is no lack of reinforcements; one man is as handsome as the next. Catherine’s heart is cold; she has become utterly self-possessed and high-handed. The role of a woman who uses her intelligence and her sexual appeal to control men was tailor-made for Marlene Dietrich.

The costumes for this movie posed a special challenge for Travis Banton. The Catherine that von Sternberg was envisioning could not come across as a historical figure. The costumes had to highlight Dietrich’s power, energy, and authority as she played the role of Catherine the Great. Von Sternberg used Catherine’s clothing as an outward display of her inner transformation. When she was an innocent young girl, she favored flowing fabrics and frills, but as she sheds her illusions, she begins to wear dresses that hug her body and emphasize her curves. For her triumphal procession, Catherine dons a white uniform with close-fitting slacks; boots; saber; and a high, white fur hat. Sexual, military, and political power come together in her hands. Amy Jolly, X-27, Shanghai Lily, and Helen Faraday were willing to subjugate themselves for the sake of love, but loving Catherine requires submission and sacrifice on the part of men.

Even though this film has several fine scenes, it did not sit well with most critics. When The Scarlet Empress opened in May 1934, audiences were going for short, witty films with snappy dialogue. Andrew Sarris summarized the problematic mismatch as follows: “Sternberg was then considered slow, decadent, and self-indulgent, while gloriously ambiguous Marlene Dietrich was judged too rich for the people’s blood—it was a time for bread, not cake.”⁷⁸ The Scarlet Empress was most definitely cake.

Von Sternberg knew that their time together was coming to an end. His love of Dietrich was devouring him. As a kind of self-defense in the face of the growing crowd of her lovers, he had begun an affair of his own. Dietrich feared parting ways with him, yet she pressed ahead with doing so. At the same time, she was realizing that she would not be able to return to Europe. She was worried about her husband in Paris.

Dearest Papitsch,

I’ve finally gotten around to writing to you. Have my first free day—and even this chance is possible only because I have worked at night for the whole week. . . . I look sweet in the movie, very young—as I said, in the movie. In real life, I have the wrinkles on my cheeks that you already discovered once. I’m just getting old. What is Tami doing—is she putting eggs on her face, and who is laughing with her? The Arden mask she got me is quite lovely. Apart from that, there isn’t much that can be done. I still need a good cream for the night. I long so terribly to see you and Tami. And you could be of such great help at work. . . . You would have a fabulous and interesting position here. Maybe you’ll think it over after all and come here. I never suggested it to you before because of you, so as not to push you into an inadequate position, but now things are different. . . .

Please leave right away if danger is looming. Do me the favor of buying big suitcases tomorrow so you can throw everything into them and get out. You know that suitcases are always in short supply at the last minute. And if you’re trying to take everything with you in a hurry, it can spoil everything if you don’t have suitcases. Please do it. Please, Tami, help me make sure that he gets everything ready so that he can leave Paris in a couple of hours if possible—he’ll always find ships. Your things can be packed quickly, but his papers and books and other things take up a lot of space. Please, please do it!

I’ve taken out accident insurance, 600 dollars a year, premium of 25,000 dollars in case of death, 1,000 dollars a month for 52 weeks if unable to work. I signed the life insurance policy on Monday. 100,000 dollars payable to you upon my death. 200,000 dollars if the death results from an accident. (But I firmly believe that I will not die in bed.) . . . I find that it is irresponsible not to be insured. This way our child will have an inheritance and you will have no worries. Darling, I miss you so much. Even though you sometimes gripe, you are the best and truest. I love you, your Mutti.⁷⁹

There was a new tone in this letter. She was feeling old. Almost shyly, she was making an offer to her husband to work with her and von Sternberg. This was a sensitive subject, because Sieber felt inferior to von Sternberg. The passage about the suitcases always being in short supply while ships are always available is symptomatic of Dietrich’s life. After she left Berlin, she lived out of suitcases. Her innumerable suitcases, which were perennially en route between Europe and America, encased her like protective armor. She never attached much importance to houses, but suitcases were quite another matter.

Despite her enduring feelings of unhappiness and melancholy, Dietrich was voracious in her quest for love affairs. At a Harald Kreutzberg dance performance in September 1932, she had met Mercedes de Acosta. De Acosta was trying her hand at screenwriting, and all of Hollywood was whispering about her relationship with Greta Garbo. But Garbo had gone off to Europe and had left the “White Prince,” as de Acosta liked to call herself, alone in America. The initiative for the affair supposedly came from Dietrich, who is said to have positively besieged de Acosta.⁸⁰ On September 16, Dietrich and de Acosta spent their first night together, as we gather from a letter from de Acosta two months later: “On the 16th of this month it will be eight small weeks since that holy and flaming night that you gave yourself to me.” De Acosta’s letters show that she was an utterly unhappy, lonely woman desperate for attention. She was one of the many unsuccessful and penniless screenwriters in Hollywood. Time and again, Dietrich lent her large sums of money, for which she expressed her gratitude in florid prose: “Always I remember the beauty of your gesture in giving me this money.”⁸¹ Often she could pay back only a fraction of the money, or nothing at all. De Acosta advised Dietrich never to ask anyone for money. The rule of the film business was to appear indifferent and rich. De Acosta’s letters to Dietrich were one long affirmation of her love, yet all she could come up with was hackneyed pathos. As for Dietrich, the idea of sharing a lover with Garbo might have been intriguing.⁸² Supposedly the two of them never met, but their lives intersected again and again. Mamoulian shot his next film after Song of Songs with Garbo. In Queen Christine, Garbo was a Swedish queen, while Dietrich was playing Catherine the Great at virtually the same time. De Acosta’s penchant for Hollywood gossip was her undoing. Dietrich felt betrayed by her and ended the relationship. Her farewell letter to de Acosta speaks volumes.

In which manner Mr. von Sternberg treats me on the set is nobodys affair and to tell Twardowski about the signing or not signing up of an actor because I liked him is too much. . . . I understand that you are alone and have the desire to talk to someone—please leave me out of these conversations. Excuse my English and the mistakes; I must go to the studio and am in a hurry. Marlene⁸³

Dietrich then embarked on an affair with her colleague Brian Aherne, whom she had met during the filming of Song of Songs. Aherne was a British theater actor who had been working in Hollywood since 1930. Perhaps she shifted her homesickness for Europe from France to England, and replaced Chevalier with Aherne. Aherne’s letters provide a glimpse into the quintessential course of a love affair with Dietrich. At first he was overwhelmed by the fact that this beautiful woman had chosen him to be her lover and felt a bit haughty toward his predecessors. Aherne sent poetic letters embellished with quotations from Shakespeare. He liked to write while sitting in his dressing room at the theater waiting to go onstage. He was surrounded by things she had sent him: an ashtray, pajamas, a cigarette case, and even a hairbrush. There would appear to be a strategy at work here. She gave generous gifts to all her lovers. At first they were delighted, but when all that remained of the affair were the gifts themselves and Dietrich no longer showed her face, these objects of memory became a source of torment. Aherne was no exception. He started in on the usual litany of complaints about her failure to contact him, declaring that he was eager to follow her anywhere—if he only knew where she was. She did not reply. His notes to her took on a tone of desperation, and his only consolation lay in picturing the times they had spent together. When he spoke to her on the telephone, her voice was cold and unfeeling. He wrote: “Do you think, Dietrich, that you might manage one day to say something nice to me on the telephone?”⁸⁴ Jealousy and doubts welled up in him, even as he tried to convince himself that he ought to be happy about what he had shared with her. Aherne wrote letters of the sort Dietrich had read many times before. He was sitting in some hotel room feeling lonesome, tired, and unhappy, with only one wish, namely to take her in his arms and make love to her. Eventually he started to find his own letters and declarations of love tedious. In any case, Dietrich turned a deaf ear to his pleas, and Aherne despised himself for his love and desire. She covered up the fact that her love had faded by soothing him with a home-baked cake and shopping for him when he was shooting his next film in Hollywood, but she made herself scarce when he wanted to eat with her.

While Dietrich was in Europe, Aherne came over to shoot a film in Austria. He had accepted this offer only because they had made plans to meet in Munich or Salzburg. Now he was stuck in a remote Tyrolean village. The rain never let up, the food was inedible, the evening entertainment was limited to folk dancing, and he spent his nights freezing under a heavy blanket. Clinging to his faith in her, he sent her ardent love letters, and when she did not reply, he called her up and found out that she had gone to Salzburg. He felt betrayed. Shortly before he left Tyrol, she sent him a startling telegram stating that they would not be able to get together at all because she was on her way to Vienna, and on September 20, she would be heading back to the United States. “I have never in my whole life been so willfully hurt,” he wrote.⁸⁵ Aherne was forced to realize that Dietrich had already plunged into her next love affair, and he had been shunted aside. She scanned his letters and telegrams only for compliments and declarations of love; nothing else interested her.

In late October 1933, Rudi Sieber supplied facts and figures to show her that it was not worth keeping the apartment in Berlin until the lease ran out in 1936. He wanted to close up the apartment once and for all and store their furniture with Josefine von Losch. Dietrich found it difficult to warm up to this idea. She was homesick: “I’m very unhappy, full of longing. . . . You have to come if I can’t travel after this movie. Frankly, I’m horrified at the thought of packing up again and dragging the whole cavalcade across the ocean. We could get together in New York. . . . Or doesn’t Tami feel like doing that? Kisses kisses kisses always, Your adoring Mutti.”⁸⁶

Although Dietrich was blessed with lovers, sunshine, and luxuries of every kind, she was unhappy. All the back and forth between Europe and America was taking a toll on her. A brittle, faded letter from Sieber to the state authority in Prague, dated November 30, 1933, indicates that the Siebers were attempting to apply for Czech citizenship. Sieber cited his merits on behalf of the country in World War I and asserted that he and his wife had taken on German citizenship against their will.

My wife is acting in Hollywood under her stage name, Marlene Dietrich . . . and has not gone back to Berlin since March 31, 1930 apart from a brief vacation in 1931. Likewise, I have not been in Berlin at all since 1931, but instead have been steadily employed in Paris as an executive producer at Paramount and as of April 1931 I gave up my residency in Berlin permanently.

He affirmed that they intended to transfer their assets and settle down in the town of Aussig, although it may be hard to picture Dietrich leaving Hollywood to live there with her husband and their child. Once the fees were due and they were required to disclose their finances, the Siebers withdrew their application.⁸⁷ As is evident here and elsewhere, their lack of money was a central theme of their relationship. Even though they had given up their apartment in Berlin, two households still had to be maintained. Sieber hesitated to come to America because Tamara had only a Nansen passport that was issued to stateless individuals. The question was whether she would be able to get a visa for the United States. “Of course it would interest me to work with you in a position that is worthy of you, or of me as ‘Herr Dietrich.’ But how do we solve the problem of ‘Tami’?”⁸⁸

The last movie Dietrich made with von Sternberg was The Devil is a Woman. Von Sternberg gave her no directives, yet she put in a brilliant performance. She first appeared on screen as a veiled beauty in a horse-driven carriage on the occasion of the Carnival celebrations. Dietrich did not know what von Sternberg had in mind until she was already standing in the carriage. Balloons were covering her face. Then he shot at the balloons with an air gun. “When the scene began, I took aim and exploded the concealing balloons to reveal one of the most fearless and charming countenances in the history of films. Not a quiver of an eyelash, nor the slightest twitch in the wide gleaming smile was recorded by the camera at a time when anyone other than this extraordinary woman would have trembled in fear.”⁸⁹ One last time, he would assert his power on the set over the woman he loved. He was quite sure that she would not bat an eyelash when he shot the pellets. As the daughter of a Prussian soldier, she was able to weather sadistic attacks of this kind. Right down to the end, she let him be her creator. Making up at home was just as much a part of this game as humiliation in front of everyone else. After his death, she admitted that she had suffered under him. “Before I finish this chapter, I would like still to mention what I feared most in him: his contempt. A shocking experience. Several times during the day, he would send me back to my dressing room so that I could cry in peace. After talking to me in German, he would turn to the technicians and say: ‘Smoking break. Miss Dietrich is having one of her crying fits.’ ”⁹⁰ When he scorned her, she was seized with panic that he would send her back where he had found her. Dietrich believed that she could not act without the safeguard of von Sternberg’s genius.

The movie was based on the book La Femme et le pantin (The Woman and the Puppet) by Pierre Louys; John Dos Passos helped develop the screenplay. Dietrich played Concha Perez, who, like Bizet’s Carmen, works in a cigarette factory, where an older, high-ranking officer named Don Pasqual takes an interest in her. Concha is out to destroy him. He squanders his fortune on her and has to give up his military career, all for a woman who no longer even lets him kiss her and is openly cheating on him. The Devil is a Woman is set during Carnival. Confetti, masks, costumes, balls, and streamers form the background of the movie. Everyone is in high spirits, and everything seems permissible. But death can lurk behind any mask. The only one who seems to fear neither death nor devil is Concha. Dietrich pulls out all the stops: she sweet-talks, pouts, offends, beguiles, triumphs, lies, seduces, deceives, and savors the power of a woman. Draped in fine lace, caressed by light and shadows, she waits like a spider for men to enter her web. Her wide-brimmed hats and high mantillas make every man—even those in uniform or masks—appear small next to her. In this movie, Dietrich sings a seductive little song yet barely shows her legs, and seems to be brimming with energy. She often strikes her signature pose with arms akimbo, looking daggers at everybody and upstaging them all.

In April 1934, she wrote to her friend Max Kolpé in Paris that she fell quite ill after the filming of Scarlet Empress was completed:

This movie was the hardest thing we ever made. I don’t know if I’m any good—I don’t think so. I’m not bad either, but insignificant, it seems to me. Sternberg was a pure genius once again. . . . Maybe because it’s the spring over there, but all of a sudden I’m longing for Berlin. Here, in the everlasting summer, I really miss that. I think back to late afternoons in a car with the top down (down for the first time that season), heading along the Kurfürstendamm, and, for no apparent reason, a chuckle in my throat. Perhaps it was because we were young and at home. I am fighting so hard against feeling dead here and against feeling dead in general, against the hollow feeling inside. I keep giving, and I get nothing in return. The child is all grown up now. Please do write to me Marlene.⁹¹

There she was, sitting in her villa in Hollywood with a swimming pool, everlasting sunshine, and a Rolls Royce, and she was longing for a spring drive on the Kurfürstendamm. She recalls the “chuckle in my throat” that welled up “for no apparent reason.” That kind of thing had not happened for quite some time, because in Hollywood nothing comes about inadvertently. Once the final movie with Jo had been shot, Dietrich felt as though she had no home. She was feeling her youth slipping away at the age of thirty-three. She could not complain about a lack of lovers, but she was afraid of what the future held. And now she had to cope with the end of her work with Jo. The hollow feeling inside came back, a feeling that Jo had been able to assuage every now and then. To whom could she confide her doubts about her talent once Jo was gone? Dietrich was enough of a professional to know that their relationship had reached an impasse. As a lover, he became more and more draining, and in the film industry he was no longer considered a bigwig after a series of flops. The critics wrote that he had made her a “Paramount whore.” She needed to leave him in order to advance her career, and he gave the artist Marlene Dietrich back to the larger world of film. Directors were already lining up to show the world what fabulous movies they could make with her. With The Devil is a Woman, von Sternberg was intent on paying a final tribute to the woman he loved and the artist he had created, and she declared that this was her favorite film. On May 3, 1935, their last motion picture together premiered in New York. From then on, their cinematic partnership was history.

Dietrich could always be sure of von Sternberg. Time and again he took her back, no matter whom she thought she loved at the time. Now that she was over thirty, she was forced to see love in a new light, not the way she had back in Berlin when she was in her twenties. Even a woman like Dietrich could not get around the fact that a list of things she had not achieved and might never achieve was taking clear shape. Von Sternberg, who loved her, had shielded her from ideas of this kind. When she was an old woman—long after von Sternberg had died—she took the blame upon herself for what had gone wrong. Von Sternberg would love Dietrich for the rest of his life. A smile still lit up his otherwise serious face when he saw Lola Lola on the screen during a 1961 interview. When Peter Bogdanovich met with von Sternberg in his later years, he sensed the latter’s deep sorrow and pain about the love he had lost.⁹² Von Sternberg was extremely reluctant to discuss his films with Bogdanovich because doing so touched on the most sensitive spot of his emotional life, namely his unrequited love for Dietrich. His movies were his way of wooing her. He offered her his artistic services, and demanded unconditional compliance in return. For him, training went hand in hand with discipline, and Dietrich, the daughter of a Prussian soldier, understood that. “It was not my beauty or charm that fascinated him, but rather my peculiar capacity for discipline, which is almost unheard of among actresses, that attracted him to me.”⁹³ She would love him in her way, but he was head over heels in love with her. In 1935, he parted ways with his divine “Miss Dietrich.”

Dietrich worked under subsequent directors with the disdain of someone who is accustomed to better. And once she was gone, von Sternberg was no longer capable of effecting transformations. They would both experience phantom pain for the rest of their lives.

“A slight man with one of those obligatory cashmere polo coats, complete with trailing belt. He was sharp, quick-witted, with a sense of humor and New York savvy.”⁹⁴ This was Maria Riva’s description of Harry Edington, Dietrich’s right-hand man. As her agent, he saw to all the details: the story, the director, the pay, the cameraman, the dressing room—and in a matter that had now become essential, he made sure that her partner was not too young. He dealt with her landladies and made it his business to find her good housekeepers, rooms in hotels, and secretaries. He took care of every matter, large and small, right down to which dresses, capes, and trousers would be arriving on which ship. He discreetly steered her away from movie magazines to which she would be better off not granting interviews and told her what fees were appropriate for what tasks. On top of that, he made every effort to ensure her well-being and sent her telegraphs with invitations to games of tennis or dinners. Edington, who also represented Greta Garbo, was regarded in Hollywood as one of the agents who had free access to the studio bosses. For Dietrich’s next film, Desire, he negotiated a fee of two hundred thousand dollars. Frank Borzage was the director, and Ernst Lubitsch oversaw the artistic direction. By working with Lubitsch, Dietrich was in a sense returning to Berlin, yet at the same time the opportunity to work with Lubitsch meant that she had truly arrived in America. Lubitsch was born on Schönhauser Strasse in Berlin and began his career at the Deutsches Theater; now he was a Hollywood hot shot, and the Americans loved his sophisticated comedies.

In Desire, Dietrich played the jewel thief Madeleine de Beaupré, who steals a pearl necklace in Paris and plants it on an American auto mechanic, Tom Bradley, at the Spanish border. Bradley unwittingly brings the stolen goods through customs. To get the pearls back, Madeleine has to resort to all kinds of tricks, but love foils her plan when she falls for the American. The cunning jewel thief becomes an honest wife. Von Sternberg was sure to have sneered at this shallow story. Dietrich was not a sphinx, but a beautiful con artist whom love brings back onto the straight and narrow path of virtue. Desire is set in the glamorous world of luxury hotels, grand suites, and champagne glasses. Somehow one feels reminded of Dietrich’s old silent films, although these could not begin to compete with Desire in décor, spirit, and humor. Desire is light and witty entertainment—nice to watch, but lacking in depth. As von Sternberg had predicted, the critics were pleased to find that at long last, Dietrich had departed drastically from her usual style. Her costumes were no longer supercilious, erotic, and fantasy-filled, as they had been in von Sternberg’s films. Madeleine de Beaupré is an elegantly dressed woman who wears double-breasted jackets and white, medium-length skirts, yet she also dons extravagant hats and dazzling evening gowns.

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 had had a profound impact on the fashion industry. Couturiers clothed their famous clients free of charge in the hope of getting a publicity boost. These influential clients were not just aristocratic women and artists’ muses; most of them were actresses. In 1934, Dietrich became known as “the most imitated woman in the world.” Her function as a role model in the world of fashion has continued to this day. In 1935, she was one of the leading ladies in the film The Fashion Side of Hollywood. Now that she had been freed from von Sternberg’s influence, she no longer had to traipse about on railway platforms in exotic countries wearing evening gowns, but could also appear in fashionable contemporary sports blouses and blazers. Dietrich was highly critical of her old roles and von Sternberg’s way of portraying her at arm’s length. “Mr. von Sternberg never let me play love scenes—not ordinary ones, I mean, with hugging and all that, because he hates ordinary love scenes.”⁹⁵ Since he was no longer there, she re-established a bond with her audiences, as evidenced in the photographs that were now circulated about her personal life.

One famous series of photographs taken by Eugene Richee in 1935 provides an uncommonly candid view of Marlene Dietrich. Dressed in a buttoned-up white blouse, white shorts, and white high-heeled shoes, she is stretched out on a lounge chair at the pool. Basking in the sun, her laugh showing her full red lips, she is the very picture of the attractive sporty woman. She had now become part of the Hollywood society that von Sternberg disdained. Dietrich no longer sat at home and cooked while Jo worked his way through stacks of screenplays; she put in a cheerful appearance at parties, ceremonies, and premieres. Photographers from the publicity department were always on hand. A letter from Willi Forst reveals that she started to drink at this time in order to fall asleep at night.⁹⁶ Although she was relieved about not having to work with Jo anymore, once they separated, she realized the extent to which he had smoothed things over for her.

Dietrich never felt truly comfortable in Hollywood, but in public she was able to act as though there was nothing more beautiful than life in America. In this respect, she had a special position among the Germans. By the mid- and late 1930s, and into the 1940s, many German artists such as Thomas Mann, Vicki Baum, Arnold Schönberg, Peter Lorre, Franz Wachsmann, and Friedrich Hollaender were living in California, having sought refuge from Hitler. The Americans took note of the Germans’ presence in a friendly but indifferent manner, soon coming to refer to them as the “Beiunskis” because their demeanor, language, and art appeared to be guided by the phrase bei uns (“back where we come from”), which the Americans considered egocentric. These exiles were still quite proud of German tradition and German culture, and that was something that held little interest for the Americans, least of all for the Americans who wanted to live in Hollywood and earn their living by making films. This was a painful experience for many. Dietrich generally kept her distance from the tightly knit and narrow-minded exile circles in Hollywood, though from time to time, she dropped in on Salka Viertel’s salon in Santa Monica. She knew that cultural or political arrogance would not bolster her career. She was an outsider among the outsiders. Dietrich was a German Protestant artist who happened to wind up in the United States in order to work there. Assimilation was not a problem for her. It was her profession to be an actress, and she could be seen in both good and bad movies. She did not actually enjoy life in Los Angeles. Although she got offers to work in Germany, she felt that the only decent option was to reject them. She had no intention of working with the National Socialists, and so she stayed in the desert, where a person could not put down roots.

Los Angeles is a city that has always attracted foreigners. Every resident is an emigrant from somewhere in the world, yet the diversity of backgrounds is undercut by the monotonous sameness of the living conditions. Southern California, with its mild climate, wide horizon, and virtually boundless spaces, developed into a mecca for talented architects, urban planners, and designers who came to make Los Angeles a city of the future. The city was largely spared from the economic depression and was the place in which the American dream was still center stage, unfazed by the woes everywhere else. The sun shone for everyone. Here there was the money, the optimism, and the space to build a new world. Wilshire Boulevard, which extended from the Pacific Ocean into the city, created a link between nature and culture. The stars cruised from their beach houses to the film studios in their sleek automobiles. This was the modernity that made southern California the envy of the world. One needed a car and a telephone to survive in this city. Anyone who was not mobile did not belong.⁹⁷ This was where the modern architectural designs were perfected for consumer-oriented modernity on the move. Supermarkets, motels, urban highways, gas stations, shopping centers, and drive-ins came to be defining features of the middle class throughout the world, with bank withdrawals, purchases, breakups, and hellos and goodbyes handled by rolling down car windows. Business and everyday transactions were conducted matter-of-factly and with impersonal friendliness. Everyone was on his or her own. Los Angeles was an avaricious city that was all about winners. The climate could drive you crazy, Hannah Arendt claimed, and even people who were reminded of Italy would be hard pressed to find the beautiful soul of this city. What mattered here were roles and earnings; everything else was relegated to the sidelines. Party lists were put together according to box-office success. All too easily, people were erased from these lists and waited for invitations in vain.

Eventually Dietrich came to accept the fact that she would have to remain in Hollywood and tried to make the best of it. She had been accustomed to spontaneous get-togethers back in Berlin, and she enjoyed going to the farmer’s market that opened in Hollywood in 1934. It was laid out in the American colonial style, like a farm in the Midwest. There were stands that sold fruit, meat, vegetables, and fish, along with concession booths that had their own tables and chairs. Something was always going on here—people were shopping, haggling, talking, gossiping, drinking, and eating. She liked this rather European type of public space. A person could drop in on a casual basis and meet up with people without advanced planning or invitations. Dietrich also greatly enjoyed riding out to an amusement park in Ocean Park, Santa Monica, perhaps because all the hustle and bustle reminded her of her life in Berlin.⁹⁸

In November 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected the thirty-second president of the United States. His message of making the “forgotten man” the central theme of his campaign proved to be a winning strategy. For the past fifteen years, the country had undergone a process of profound change: The entry of the United States into World War I had made the country a world power overnight. For the first time in the history of this country, some two million young men were being sent to a continent far away to wage war. After the dreadful years of the war and the Great Depression, Americans in the early 1930s were receptive to a politician who gave them cause for optimism. Roosevelt’s inaugural address found just the right words for the country’s state of mind. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” This statement was the new credo that Americans had been waiting for.

In contrast to the grim, inscrutable dictators in Europe and the Soviet Union, Roosevelt made no secret of his love of life. The dictators stayed in the background for quite some time. America was preoccupied with its own issues. Roosevelt won the presidential election of 1936 by an overwhelming majority. This success certainly rested in large measure on his promise not to lead the United States into war. Americans did not want to be embroiled in the conflicts of others yet again. This was especially true of people in the film industry in Hollywood, who wanted to earn their money in peace. Adolph Zukor, head of Paramount Pictures, declared: “I don’t think that Hollywood should deal with anything but entertainment. The newsreels take care of current events. To make films of political significance is a mistake. When they go to a theatre they want to forget.”⁹⁹ In the 1930s, Hollywood was a world power. Nothing could make a bigger mockery of the dead seriousness of the dictators than the flippant refinement of Hollywood.

Dietrich chose to live in exile on her own. She remained in Hollywood. In letters, telephone calls, and telegrams, she kept up with what was going on in Berlin, Vienna, and Paris, but the extant correspondence barely mentioned the political situation. Personal issues and needs were front and center, as usual. She preferred to turn to her mother when she had medical questions. Dietrich suffered from the delusion that she was too fat, and her daughter too tall. There was no medical remedy for either of these conditions, but Josefine von Losch went ahead and asked Dr. Salomon in Berlin for advice, and telegraphed his reply to her daughter in Hollywood. Josefine was now so thrilled with her daughter’s acting prowess that she even copied out movie reviews and dispensed advice. She asked: “How satisfied are you with your staff? Are class distinctions emphasized or is everything peaceful?”¹⁰⁰ Her tone was affectionate, and she often reminded Dietrich of little sayings and ditties from her childhood. Aunt Jolly, whom Josefine had never liked and who had now taken off with Ernst Udet, was making life difficult for her. She poured out her heart to her younger daughter about the hardships the merry widow was causing for her. Josefine devoted herself to firming up her daughter’s reputation in Germany. SEND ME CABLE PROVING THAT YOU ARE NOT COMMITTED MENTAL INSTITUTION AS TRIBUNE HEADLINE SCREAMS HAVE TO DENY IGNORE RUMORS WRONG ATTITUDE ABOUT TIME YOU TAKE MY ADVICE MUTTI.¹⁰¹ There is no mention of her wanting to leave Germany and come to America. Quite the opposite: Josefine hoped that her daughter would return to Europe after parting with von Sternberg, whom the family liked to call “Etoile.” In August 1935, she wrote her a letter in which she expressed regret about her daughter’s decision to remain in America. She thought it was terrible to live only for money, devoid of any joy and pleasure, the way Dietrich was living.

Everything that happened with Etoile, his hapless, divorced wife, everything? Everything took its toll in time and nerves. . . . Here it was said a thousand times that if Marlene Dietrich only didn’t have that bizarre, eccentric Etoile anymore. . . . You are in any case to be pitied from the bottom of my soul. ‘Landgraf werde hart.’ [Landgrave, grow hard.] I have a thousand worries that you will only be disappointed once again and you will eat up your disappointments slowly like tasty tidbits instead of getting a whiff of them beforehand and avoiding them in the first place. Poor, dear Lena; it’s too bad that there is an ocean between us.¹⁰²

This letter reveals a side of Dietrich that she tried to conceal from the public. Her mother characterized her as someone with a penchant for suffering, someone who gobbles up disappointments like tasty tidbits and makes no attempt to steer clear of them. In November 1936, Dietrich was terrified at the thought that she might have gotten this penchant from her father. Her mother tried to calm her down and reassure her. She urged her daughter to leave aside her brooding once and for all and to enjoy life.

Rudolf Sieber continued to live in Paris, but visited his wife from time to time. On these occasions the whole family gathered in Coconut Grove. Dietrich, wearing a big hat, a well-chosen array of jewelry, and an elegant evening gown, was easy to identify as the most important person at the table. The others were mere accessories. Sieber looked startlingly young in his tuxedo and had his beautiful lover Tamara at his side, who followed everything that was going on around her with wide eyes. Maria sat between her parents. She was a bright, well-behaved girl, and spent a lot of evenings with her parents and their lovers in fine restaurants. To redress the gender imbalance, Fritz Lang or von Sternberg would be asked to join the group on occasion.

In January 1935, Dietrich welcomed Elisabeth Bergner to the United States. Catherine the Great and The Scarlet Empress coexisted peacefully. The friendship between Bergner and Dietrich served to boost the success of the films, then blossomed into a love affair. Dietrich was Bergner’s “sweet lover” and “Circe.” Bergner was spirited and tender, while Dietrich was cold and restrained. Their affair must have been passionate, though it was a well-kept secret. In April 1935, Bergner sent Dietrich this cable to Hollywood: I EAT YOU I SMELL YOU I GREASE YOU POWDER OIL RUB OINTMENT ON YOU AND WHAT I HAVE FORGOTTEN IS KNOWN TO ME ALONE LISL.¹⁰³

After parting ways with von Sternberg, Dietrich proceeded to make money rather than art. The truly remarkable part of her next movie, The Garden of Allah, was the fact that she was able to earn two hundred thousand dollars and be filmed in Technicolor for the first time. The movie would not be a good one, but the large sum of money was enticing, and she had no real alternative. She devoted her energy not to her acting but to making herself look good. There was constant bickering about the lighting, the costumes, and her need for impeccable hairdos. Part of the movie was shot in the Yuma Desert, under trying conditions. Everyone was sweating, and toupées were slipping out of place, but Dietrich was “as dry as toast,” as her daughter wrote.¹⁰⁴ The colors in the movie were beguiling, and the stills of Dietrich in a chiffon robe in the desert wind were seductive, but the movie itself was unbearable. “The great abstractions come whistling hoarsely out in Miss Dietrich’s stylized, weary, and monotonous whisper, among the hideous Technicolor flowers, the yellow cratered desert like Gruyère cheese, the beige faces.”¹⁰⁵ No sooner was the shooting over in July 1936 than Dietrich packed her bags and traveled to London for her next film. This time, she had been loaned to Alexander Korda for a movie that would pay her $450,000, a romantic drama set in the period of the Russian Revolution and directed by Jacques Feyder. As with every other director after von Sternberg, she had difficulty working with Feyder. Dietrich staunchly defended her vision of how she needed to appear. When things got especially bad, she whispered into the microphone, “Jo, where are you?” Feyder complained that everything had to be tailor-made to her specifications. The only reality that she was prepared to accept was a beautiful image of herself. If she had got it into her head that she wanted to wear an evening gown while working in the fields, the screenplay would simply have to be changed. Knight Without Armour is better than its reputation. Dietrich played Countess Alexandra as a proud and courageous woman. One morning she wakes up and rings for her servants, but none of them responds. Wearing a white chiffon coat, she comes upon rebelling peasants and servants in the park, destroying paintings and furniture and looting the castle. In the course of the plot, she has to struggle along between the lines of the White and Red armies. Both the Whites and the Reds have power-hungry and brutal men, but there are also sensitive and smart ones. The film was not successful, but Dietrich’s fee was so substantial that its reception was not terribly important to her.

Her mother and sister kept her informed about her sustained popularity in Germany. The Scarlet Empress was the hit of the year in 1934 in Berlin; The Devil is a Woman was also shown and Desire ran in theaters until mid-January 1939. Dietrich’s portrait was featured on magazine covers, and attempts to vilify her as a “non-German” failed at first.¹⁰⁶ Even propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels preferred Dietrich’s femme fatale to the pasty faces of the new era. “Then with Hitler. ‘Shanghai Express.’ Marlene Dietrich is talented.”¹⁰⁷ He regretted the fact that she was no longer working in Germany.¹⁰⁸ Horst Alexander von der Heyde, the production manager at Tobis Cinema, flew to London in 1936 at Christmastime to meet with Dietrich. Her mother had assured him that she would see him. He did not come empty-handed; he brought her a Christmas tree from Berlin and two official letters. The Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda affirmed “that from this point on, publications by the German press that are detrimental to the reputation of Frau Dietrich will no longer be printed.”¹⁰⁹ The propaganda ministry urged that negotiations with Dietrich be taken up for a movie in a German and English or French version. Dietrich was assured she would get every possible accommodation from the top German administrators for matters pertaining to direction, themes, screenplays, exchange rates, tax issues, acting fees, and personal amenities. Von der Heyde sat alone in his London hotel room under the Christmas tree from Berlin and waited in vain. Dietrich did not contact him.

She had found a new lover in London. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., the twenty-six-year-old son of the great actor Douglas Fairbanks, was divorced from Joan Crawford. He was a rich American who was generous with his money. He made her a present of a gold cigarette case studded with diamonds and sapphires. Fairbanks was not as poetic as von Sternberg; the engraving he chose was a simple Duschka (darling).

On one of her many trips to Europe, Dietrich had bought a 16-millimeter camera and enjoyed making home movies or being filmed off the set. She often brought her camera to work and filmed the crew, but most of her pictures were of her family, friends, and colleagues. Of the twenty-eight minutes of Dietrich’s home movie material that have been released, a good many are devoted to Fairbanks. Dietrich and Fairbanks did not act like two American film stars, but like a British upper-class couple. They liked to put in appearances at the race track. During a boat ride on the Thames, a beaming Douglas sat with a pensive Dietrich, and in a second boat sat an awkward Rudi Sieber, his daughter at his side. Dietrich, quite pale, with lips painted bright red and a high-necked pullover, looked like a lady. In a rare harmonious scene, we see Dietrich lying on a ship, the sleeping Douglas on her lap. She is dressed all in white, her outfit forming a nice contrast to the blue water, and she has placed a hand on his shoulder as though to protect him.

In the summer of 1937, Fairbanks traveled with her to Arlberg, Austria. Sieber and Tamara Matul came with them. A photograph shows Fairbanks standing in front of the train with a Tyrolean hat, with Dietrich, Sieber, and Matul approaching on the railway platform, all four dressed in the traditional garb of their travel destination. The women are wearing crocheted jackets that are fitted at the waist; Dietrich is in white, and Matul in black. Fairbanks took pictures of them in short lederhosen in front of their vacation cottage. He is lying in the grass, playing with a blade of grass between his lips, his white shirt unbuttoned. He is a handsome, strong, suntanned man with a distinctive face who looks like the embodiment of temptation. Dietrich is clearly impressed.

Just a few days after Fairbanks left Austria, Dietrich went to Venice to see von Sternberg. Since their split, he had sought solace in travel and collecting works of art. In 1935, the Los Angeles County Museum dedicated an exhibit to his art collection, which included works by Egon Schiele, Vincent van Gogh, Aristide Maillol, Oskar Kokoschka, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Auguste Rodin, Rudolf Belling, Constantin Brancusi, Georg Kolbe, Alexander Archipenko, and Picasso’s La Gameuse as the highlight. In the same year, von Sternberg had a house built. The architect was Richard Neutra, who was also born in Vienna. Neutra was regarded as the radical modernist. The house was a fortress of solitude. The structure was elegant and elongated, and the building was surrounded by a castle moat filled with water. The outer walls were covered with aluminum. The rooms were bathed in light, and in front of the house, an American flag waved in the desert wind. This is where von Sternberg safeguarded the treasures of his past and yearned for Dietrich. She did not like his new house. Avant-garde solitude was not her style. A single visit to inspect the place was quite enough for her. Von Sternberg did not hold out for long in San Fernando Valley.¹¹⁰ He had intended to make this desert castle a refuge from Dietrich, but he was not far enough away from what he wanted to leave behind him.

So he set out on a trip around the world. While Dietrich was staying at Claridge’s in London, enjoying her love affair with Fairbanks, she received cards full of longing from Jo in Asia. She got a postcard from the temple at Angkor Wat. In the jungles of Cambodia, he lit a candle for her. He visited the gods and wrote to his goddess. In the fall of 1936, he wrote her one of his last long love letters from the Great Wall of China. He had been to Korea, Japan, China, and Manchuria, yet the letter conveys the impression that all he had found anywhere was Marlene: “Shanghai Lily was often sitting next to me.” He was still struggling with the end of their romance. “Every now and then, I’ll let you know where I’m staying, so that you can send me a telegram every now and then. You still write lovely words, but unfortunately not only to me.” He was uncertain about whether he would ever make another motion picture. “Get some nice work done and give me a treat—and if you often think of me, I’ll know it, and the place in my heart where I have tucked you away will glow, Jo.”¹¹¹ In the summer of 1937, he was in Europe preparing for a new movie. Dietrich had been filming Angel with Lubitsch in Hollywood until June and had no other contract lined up. In recent times, she may have paid too much attention to the fee she was offered and too little to the quality. Getting together with her creator, and in Venice at that, would draw the press’s attention to her.

During September of 1937, von Sternberg’s heart was not likely to have glowed very often. “A great deal happened to us in September—the Lido with the boats along the horizon in the evening like butterflies,” Erich Maria Remarque wrote to Dietrich after the end of their love affair. She would be his “autumn love.”¹¹² It was not the first time that their paths had crossed. In 1930 in Berlin, they had met in the bar of the Eden Hotel. Remarque recalled the vision of the young Dietrich in a light gray suit with her even shoulders, which he loved so dearly. Back then, in Berlin, he claims already to have known that she would be staying in his life. In the hotel bar, he ought to have risen from his chair, gone up to her, and said: “Come away with me—why stay here?”¹¹³ But he backed away instead. For seven years, he sought refuge “in indifference and adventures, in ruination and dissipation, in the vapid freedom of the witless.”¹¹⁴ Venice brought them together again. We do not know whether Dietrich recalled this meeting in Berlin when she saw Remarque in Venice; she was probably just attracted to this elegant, good-looking, successful, and well-to-do man. Although Remarque was charming and amiable, she sensed his shy reserve and regarded it as a challenge to break through it. In her memoirs, she told of having met up with him again the following day on the beach with a volume of Rilke poems under her arm, which impressed him. He commented sarcastically: “I see you read good authors.” She replied: “Shall I recite a few poems to you?”¹¹⁵ Decades later, however, she described their encounter somewhat differently in a telephone conversation with her friend Johannes Mario Simmel: “On the way to the hotel, he said: ‘By the way, just to clarify things right away so there are no silly discussions later: I am totally impotent . . . but, at your request, I can of course be quite an enchanting little lesbienne.’ Marlene: ‘God, was I relieved! God, did I love that man.’ ”¹¹⁶ His impotence was only temporary, and she kept on loving him nevertheless.

Of all of Dietrich’s many lovers, Remarque was most similar to her in nature. Remarque, a soldier and teacher from Osnabrück with a penchant for writing, had come to Berlin in 1925 as an editor of a sports newspaper. He was a dapper dresser, and his colleagues regarded him as a stuffed shirt. He had no political affiliations. In 1927, he wrote All Quiet on the Western Front, an antiwar novel that became the most successful German-language book of the twentieth century and brought him fame and fortune overnight. Regarded with hostility in Germany, he left the country and led a nomadic life that his newfound wealth made possible. Remarque became an art collector and a wine connoisseur, and lived in luxury hotels. As was the case with Dietrich, this early departure from Germany gave him a cosmopolitan outlook tinged with a vague sense of homesickness. Both had nagging doubts about their own talent and were tormented by thoughts of failing as artists. Remarque, like Dietrich, would not return to Germany. He bought himself a villa outside of Ascona in Switzerland, right on Lake Maggiore. In the 1930s, he spent lengthy periods of time in his lakeside house far away from people and cities with his dogs, his pictures, and his books. His neighbor, Emil Ludwig, commented that Remarque cultivated a life of solitude, enlivened by women and cocktails. He could spend his nights on bar stools for months on end, listening to other people’s confessions, then head to a dive to pick up a streetwalker and bring her to his room. Remarque was considered an homme à femmes; he loved women, and they loved him. He tended to fall for slender, aloof, beautiful women like Dietrich.

In September 1937, Dietrich and Remarque became lovers in Venice. Since neither of them had to answer to anyone else, they spent the months up until her November 10 departure at Hotel Lancaster in Paris. Their romance centered on hotels. Remarque kept hoping that she would visit him at his house on the lake, which he talked up with such pride, but she never did.¹¹⁷ Dietrich would never row across the lake with him, never drink an aperitif in the small bars he frequented, and never walk with the dogs. She was not interested in his garden or the village life in the south, and she had no intention of sharing his solitude. Anyone who wanted to be with her would have to adapt to her lifestyle. In her own capricious way, though, Dietrich loved this man with “his ever-skeptical eyes,” and was touched by his vulnerability and almost pathological melancholia.

The letters that he wrote to her over the following months reveal how they fared during their first autumn in Paris. He spent the nights in his house in Porto Ronco longing for his lover.

It is nighttime, and I’m writing for you to call from New York. The dogs are sleeping around me, and the gramophone is playing—records that I found—easy to love—I got you under my skin awake from a dream . . . but it’s daytime where you are, the lights in the streets are just going on, you’re standing in your room, someone will go out with you to eat, to go to the theater, and the evening gowns are lying on the bed and you don’t know whether to wear the white one with the gold bodice by Schiaparelli or the black and gold one by Alix.

He delighted in picturing her trying on her clothes, imagining her transformation into a vision of beauty. He had studied her every detail in the weeks they had lived together and knew all her gestures and sounds. “But first your hair is combed with the black comb. Quickly, your head tilted to the side, and harshly torn through. Then the sigh, the gaze starting out somewhere and ending somewhere, the drifting smile directed at no one and everyone, the swift walk and the warm evening breeze on the wide Champs-Élysées.”¹¹⁸ Dietrich replied to his elaborate, handwritten letters with brief, infrequent telegrams, which confounded him because he was normally the one to make himself scarce. They rarely had time alone. Even when they were together, they were always surrounded by other people or hurrying off to meetings. Remarque longed for telephone calls so that he could hear her voice at night.

But Dietrich had other things on her mind. Back in Hollywood, her persistent fears that she had been shunted aside proved to be well founded. The Americans had seen quite enough of her and her European-inspired movies. Besides, she was not a young actress like Hedy Lamarr or Ingrid Bergman, who had now arrived in Hollywood. Harry Edington had told her back in August that he was not making much headway in his quest for a new contract. Knight Without Armour had been a flop. He implored her not to make any more movies in Europe for the time being: “It is my firm belief that you should not attempt any picture in Europe until after your citizenship is established here.”¹¹⁹ In March 1937, Dietrich had filed an application for American citizenship. Edington assured her that it would take no more than seventeen or eighteen months for the application to go through, and then she would be an American, which would greatly improve her position in the studios.

In Germany, the news that Dietrich sought to acquire American citizenship caused quite a stir, and officials felt compelled to issue a denial. Goebbels sent Heinz Hilpert to Paris. Hilpert had staged George Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance during the 1929–1930 season, with Dietrich playing the part of Hypatia. Max Reinhardt had left Berlin for good in May 1933, and one year later, Hilpert had been appointed director of the Deutsches Theater and the Kammerspiele. In November 1937, Goebbels was counting on Dietrich’s return to Berlin. “At our embassy in Paris, Marlene Dietrich issued a formal statement disparaging her slanderers and emphasized that she was, and would remain, a German. She will also be performing with Hilpert at the Deutsches Theater. I will now take her under my wing.”¹²⁰ Once Hilpert had reported back to him, Goebbels thought Dietrich would be performing in Berlin.¹²¹ She made no written mention of her encounter with Hilpert. In order to return to the United States, she needed to renew her German passport, which is why she was visiting the German embassy. She would not come back to Berlin until the end of the war, clad in an American uniform.

Remarque must have told Dietrich that his most recent novel, Three Comrades, had been bought by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer the previous year.¹²² F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the screenplay, and shooting was set to begin in November 1937. She cabled Edington in October 1937 that she would do anything in her power to act in the film version of Remarque’s last book. In December 1937 word got out that Paramount was giving Dietrich $250,000 in severance pay if she agreed not to make her next picture there. This was a tidy sum of money, but it was also a degrading situation for a woman who was used to success, because it meant that the studio was losing money on her movies. At roughly the same time, a group of independent film distributors took out an advertisement in the Hollywood Reporter, highlighted with a red border, that listed the actors they considered “box office poison.” Dietrich was on this hit list, along with Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, and others. By the beginning of the following year, Remarque had become aware of the unpleasant position his lover was in. On January 9, 1938, he sent off one of his relatively rare telegrams, offering her the lead role in Three Comrades. Although another actress had already been cast in this role, he intended to offer his services as coauthor of the screenplay to MGM if Dietrich played the lead. BEGINNING NEW BOOK FOR YOU EXCLUSIVELY CABLE WHAT IS GOING ON AND WHO SHOULD COME YOU OR I DON’T RUSH NEVER FEAR NEVER GET UPSET WE’RE JUST STARTING AND EVERYONE WILL BE AMAZED.¹²³

There is no record of her response to this offer, but Margaret Sullavan did not hand over the star role, and Dietrich came away empty-handed. The new book Remarque wanted to write exclusively for her would take several years to complete. But “Ravic,” as the main character would be named in the novel Arch of Triumph, is mentioned in his letters as early as 1938. When Remarque realized that he was unable to hold Dietrich’s interest for long, he got the idea of splitting himself into several male selves. Most of the time he turned himself into either “Alfred,” the innocent little boy who loves Aunt Lena (Dietrich) passionately and writes her postcards and letters in old-fashioned penmanship, or “Ravic,” the valiant and melancholy man who loves and supports Dietrich. With “Ravic,” the war and the hardships of emigration enter into their correspondence. Although Remarque was not taken seriously by his left-wing colleagues because of his lack of party affiliation, the National Socialists regarded him as their enemy. In 1933, Remarque’s books were burned and banned. He abhorred the National Socialists and tried to embody “the other Germany”: cultivated, intellectual, and cosmopolitan. At the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship, he believed that he was keeping a safe distance, but by 1938 he realized that the threat was drawing closer and encroaching on his life. His ex-wife, Jutta Zambona, panicked that she might be deported to Germany, and he agreed to remarry her.¹²⁴

In Remarque’s dreamy letters to Dietrich, the word “war” started to crop up more and more often. During a nighttime air-raid drill, when all of Switzerland had gone dark, he turned on the gramophone and reveled in doom and gloom: “It is sending music into the tubercular night, music of a different continent, of a different star, weary music of ruination. When will the world break into pieces?”¹²⁵ In a German magazine, he came across photographs of her and gazed in bewilderment and dismay at the woman he loved, posing for a picture eating breakfast at home, in an alien world. “Do people really believe what they’re claiming,” he asked her in a letter, “that you are going back to Germany and becoming an ornament for Ufa?”¹²⁶ When he read in the newspapers that Paramount would not be extending her contract, he assumed she would come back to Europe, and to him. WILL EXPECT YOU SOUTHAMPTON EAT AT HORCHES LONDON THEN WITH THE CAR NAPLES CAPRI AND BUDAPEST WAR OFF SPRING ON.¹²⁷

But she did not come. He spent the spring alone in his house at the lake. In his letters to her in Hollywood, he mourned for a past that they had not shared. “Why was I not with you everywhere, at least in that radiant time when the world was nothing but a really fast car and glittering froth, laughter, and youth! . . . We would never have been sad. We would have laughed and not spoken, and sometimes we would have had hours when the weight of the world would have felt like gray fog.”¹²⁸ This opportunity was gone. Remarque smelled the gunpowder and heard the muffled rumbling on the horizon. His diary entry on February 21, 1938, read: “Swimming in the afternoon. Washing hair, cleaning up—after Hitler speeches, misery of the times, and expectation of the bleakest future. In the evening a bottle of Wormser Liebfrauen Stiftswein, 1934. Necessary. The night with all the stars—over martyrs, idiots, imbeciles, fanatics, the wounded and the dead; over Spain, China, battlefields, concentration camps, sprouting fields of daffodils, criminals, crimes, and the twentieth century.”¹²⁹ In early March, Hitler incorporated Austria into the German Reich. Salzburg and Vienna were in the hands of the enemy. The impending war dredged up Remarque’s memories. “We all have so little warmth for ourselves in our hearts—we children of troubled times—so little faith in ourselves—far too much bravery and far too little hope. . . . Stupid little soldiers of life—children of troubled times—with a dream, sometimes, at night.”¹³⁰

On May 3, 1938 Dietrich arrived in Paris, where Remarque was waiting for her. Their first weeks together appear to have gone smoothly. She cooked mushroom soup, meatballs, scrambled eggs, Serbian rice with meat, apricot dumplings, and crabs for her family and for her lover in Sieber’s apartment. Together with Max Kolpé, they drank Pilsener in a little bar and touched on political issues as they chatted. Even though Dietrich was there, Remarque kept up his usual habits: he partied the nights away in fancy restaurants and backstreet bars, drank too much, and surrounded himself with prostitutes. After one of these nights, he wrote in his diary: “Letter from Marlene on the bed. Went over. Had waited. Was sweet. Even so, went away again. My room. She came. Stayed. I stank of liquor, garlic, and cigars.”¹³¹ Remarque was driven by feelings of farewell: farewell to peace, to Europe, and to happiness. At the same time, his lover was needling him incessantly. She was jealous of Zambona, who was also in Paris, and who, in turn, was jealous of her husband’s lover. Dietrich reproached him for having gotten married, and he countered that she had always had lovers on the side. Remarque’s diaries reveal a side of Dietrich that is at odds with the image of a libertarian love life. When he told her that he was off to meet up with his old girlfriend, Ruth Albu, she was not above hiding his shoes so that he could not leave the house. The worst part of life with Dietrich, he found, was the constant need to interact with her family. Rudi, Tami, and Maria were omnipresent. Remarque found Rudi in particular hard to take. In his view, Rudi was “an exquisite study of a glutton who constantly takes offense if anything is not right,” a “mindless glutton.”¹³² Because he loved Dietrich and her family was part of the package, he had no choice but to live in close proximity to these people. “I’d be better off not knowing the family,” he concluded.¹³³ He nonetheless went along with this group for a two-month vacation at a summer resort in Cap d’Antibes.

Even at the Côte d’Azur, the ominous signs of the times could not be missed: “Evenings, while we’re swimming, three big gray French war ships putting out to sea.”¹³⁴ Befitting their social status, they stayed at the opulent Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc. Dietrich was a regular guest at this hotel, which was run like a private club. The price of this exclusivity was immense. Dietrich paid for everybody, even though she had no source of income and no prospects lined up. She stayed in connecting suites with Remarque and her husband on the upper floor. Tamara Matul and Maria had separate accommodations. Dietrich and her entourage went on outings in the area and put in appearances in Cannes and Juan-les-Pins. On a photograph from one of these outings, we see a tanned Dietrich at a restaurant table with Sieber, Matul, and Remarque. Dietrich and Sieber are looking into the camera, while Remarque is shielding his face. He hated these kinds of public appearances with flashbulbs popping. They spent most of their time together at the sea. Remarque stood around in large white bathing trunks, wearing sunglasses that he would not take off when a camera was on him. He was perfectly coiffed, as always, puffing on a cigarette and looking like someone who was uncomfortable in his skin. His half-naked body seems oddly soft and ungainly. In a suit, he was a good-looking man, but in swim trunks he lost his virile elegance. His diary entries make it evident that the sea air and beach life did nothing to ameliorate his feeling of suffocation. Love in a family setting was unbearable for him, even at the Côte d’Azur. But when he finally had a chance to be alone with “the puma,” as he called Dietrich, all was well again. For him, she was “nothing but seduction.” Even so, he sensed that both he and she were feeling that their love affair was coming to an end. Remarque was not enough for Dietrich. In late August, she began an affair with a Canadian millionaire named Marion Barbara Carstairs, who went by the nickname Joe. Joe Carstairs’s brawny female physique contrasted sharply with Remarque’s feeble-looking male body. Everyone at the luxurious holiday resort bore witness to Dietrich’s humiliation of Remarque. He would stand in front of her closed door, and everyone—including him—knew that she was with Joe. “The puma” hated reproaches and commitments. Sieber helped her carry out her betrayal of Remarque. In his role as the lifelong cuckold, he was content when it happened to someone else. As always, he was Dietrich’s confidant, and he presumably offered Remarque wise words of comfort. But Remarque was clever. Although he was so deeply wounded by Dietrich’s behavior that he stood in front of his mirror and wept, he presented a cheerful façade to her. That was the best way to handle it, because Dietrich did not appreciate displays of weakness.

This undignified charade was accompanied by a steadily growing fear of war. On July 4, 1938, two weeks before Remarque arrived in Cap d’Antibes, his German citizenship had been revoked. He regarded it as an honor to be expatriated by the Nazis. In mid-September, when they returned to Paris and learned from Dietrich’s personal assistant, Resi, that draft notices had been sent out in Germany and it was rumored that the French were drafting the stateless, Dietrich changed the subject. She was distraught by the fact that Remarque had been in France for four months and had yet to receive his carte d’identité. “Sat at the radio until midnight. Ultimatum expired. Eleven dead. Czech government first demanded silence, then negotiations. Went out onto the street. Met Kolpé. Went to Le Jour. Then to Fouquet. Sat till two. Puma developed plans the whole evening. Wanted to go to Porto Ronco for me, get all of us onto a ship—go to the American embassy.”¹³⁵

No sooner had they arrived at the hotel than the subject of world politics was cast aside and the sexual hijinks started up again. Dietrich wanted to spend the night with Carstairs, but she was already asleep. Remarque was disgusted by her behavior, but she had a firm hold on him. She admitted to him that she never missed having men in her bed—only women. Even so, Dietrich asked him to buy her a wedding ring. Remarque agreed, and they headed off to Van Cleef & Arpels. He noted in his diary: “Slept with the puma. During the night she clung to me through to the morning. Had taken off Jo’s ring and watch band.”¹³⁶

Remarque knew that her soft side never lasted long. If her standoffishness got to be too much for him, he played the little boy “Alfred,” which was sure to delight her. It took a fair amount of coaxing to get her to show affection. “In the morning, the tender puma, tender, intimate, without sex. Explained she loved me and would be unhappy in America. I said she would find someone for massages, hair combing, chatting, and sleeping next to her. Maybe it’s true that for women tenderness is a more frequent need than sex. Certainly for Puma.”¹³⁷ Remarque recalled that their love had once been more passionate than companionate, and he wondered what had happened to their desire.

When “the puma” finally boarded her ship in Le Havre on November 18, 1938, he returned to his house at the lake and devoted himself to his writing. By early December, he was working on the Ravic novel, the book designed for Dietrich. It did not take long after her departure for his longing and veneration to set in. On the last day of the year 1938, he wrote her a long love letter. Remarque began the new year with a feeling of restored youth. He was calm and happy, and he was able to work because she answered his letters with letters of her own. From Dietrich’s correspondence with Sieber at this same time, we know that she complained if “Boni” (as she called Remarque) did not write or call her immediately. He was one of her links in Europe and needed to be at her beck and call around the clock, otherwise she would ask her husband to find out where her lover was. In February 1939, Remarque completed the first polished draft of his novel Flotsam, which bore the epigraph: “It takes a strong heart to live without roots.” On March 18, he took the Queen Mary from Cherbourg to New York.

“Very early in the morning, at about five o’clock, the skyline of New York, gray and massive against the bright sky, surprising and not surprising, often seen in photos, but magnificent, of course.”¹³⁸ His agent showed him the night life. He enjoyed seeing the lovely shades of gray as the light played on the concrete buildings, and admired the neon lights in the evenings, the skyscraper canyons, and jazz music. When he got back to his hotel at four in the morning, there was a message from Puma, who scolded him for behavior with journalists that was not to her liking. He knew that the best way to win her over was to feign indifference and put her in the position of courting him. Four days later, when he arrived in Los Angeles, he found Dietrich in front of her house, looking bashful and beautiful in a yellow outfit. She was excited to show him her home and hoped that he would like it. “Pretty and atrocious, but very comfortable and a great deal of effort went into setting it up for me.”¹³⁹ The quarreling started up a few days later. Dietrich was still without a movie contract. She had expected Remarque to bring her a text she could use for a movie. “Puma terribly disappointed that I did a book about emigration and not Ravic. Finds the book bad. Also disappointed that I didn’t bring any material for a film. Looks at the newspapers every day to see if we’re in them. Guess she expects it—and expects me to help her. But how? Material for films? Where would I get that?”¹⁴⁰

His hopes and dreams of love burst asunder in the cold light of day with Dietrich, the fallen Hollywood star. When they were invited to a film preview at Warner Brothers, she was worried about whether Remarque would look good in photographs. “It makes me a little sick, although I do understand it. I’m not a show dog.”¹⁴¹ At the premiere, they ran into Thomas Mann, who could not stand Remarque and was envious of the brisk sales of Remarque’s books. “Remarque and Dietrich, inferior,” he noted that evening in his diary.¹⁴² Remarque did not like Hollywood. Dietrich was either congested, jealous, ill-tempered, hostile, or temperamental. Lovemaking was out of the question, and he generally slept alone. He soon tired of rum cocktails and Hawaiian cuisine. The puma he loved had nothing in common with the Dietrich who appeared in magazines or at public events. He had written her a fretful letter even before he came to America to ask what she really stood to gain from these characters in the movie magazines.

OK, you may earn money there—but is that worth the effort? To throw away your life, which is getting more and more precious, piece by piece? It would be one thing if this were about achieving major goals—but in the age of Shirley Temple? . . . You can earn your living anywhere—so that Mr. Sieber feels a bit more secure with somewhat more money? Or your child? Your child will get by. There is enough for that purpose. Rudi could try to work for once. And you could finally start to live the way you deserve.”¹⁴³

His appeals did not get through to her. Remarque was baffled by his puma’s desire to hold her own among the cretins of Hollywood and enjoy herself with people who were constantly striking a pose in the hope of being photographed. Remarque loathed the very things that made Dietrich’s professional survival possible. By 1939 she could no longer delude herself. She had to face the fact that no one wanted to make a movie with her anymore. It was not that she cared about Hollywood, but she did need money.

On June 9, 1939, Dietrich swore an oath of allegiance to the American Constitution. She must have hoped that Edington was right in prophesying that she would be interesting to the studios once she had her American citizenship. She was in bad shape. Dissatisfied and distracted, she made a mountain out of every molehill. At times she was preoccupied with her daughter’s weight, and at other times with some item in the newspaper. Everything else paled into insignificance as far as she was concerned, including her love for Remarque. Athough he kept toying with the idea of leaving, he stayed. His trip was not a success. In June 1939, the two of them took a train to New York. Sieber, Maria, and von Sternberg were waiting for them there, and they all planned to cross the ocean to Europe together. But now that she was taking her first trip as an American citizen, Dietrich ran into difficulties with the Internal Revenue Service. Two officials showed up, demanding $240,000 in back taxes.¹⁴⁴ It turned out that as an American she could not be detained, but her husband could. In the end, she was able to settle this debt by handing over her jewels.

Remarque found Dietrich’s moods hard to take. To calm his nerves, he got together with his friend Walter Feilchenfeldt, who was an art dealer in Zurich, and bought two Cézannes and a Daumier. Owning European art was his compensation for the shortcomings of living in America. In late July, the caravan moved on from Paris to Antibes. This time von Sternberg joined the group as well, which did not make things any easier. Von Sternberg was jealous of Remarque, even though he claimed to be in love with Dolly Mollinger. Pictures of von Sternberg from the summer of 1939 give new meaning to the phrase, “He looks like a shadow of his former self.”

In Dietrich’s home movies, this final summer at the Côte d’Azur before the war was captured in Technicolor. As usual, they spent their days together at the seaside. The sparkling light of the Mediterranean sun gave their bodies a brown cast; the sea was blue, and their clothing quite colorful. The Kennedys were there as well, and the young John F. Kennedy can be seen in a bathrobe with a predatory grin, baring his absolutely perfect teeth. Despite the sun and luxury, however, no one was really happy, with the threat of war looming.

Remarque was drinking and agonizing about frittering away his time, his love, and his life. Matul needed antidepressants to get through the day. Sieber was tormented by the fear that she would leave him. He confided to Remarque that she was planning to run off with a Russian man, and if she did, what would happen to him? He was sure that Tamara was the only woman who would put up with him and this situation. Maria, who had been sent off to a Swiss boarding school, was no longer the bright-eyed, pretty child she had been. She had pubescent unhappiness written all over her face. And Remarque described Dietrich as distracted, exhausted, and melancholy. “Surrounded by my husband, my daughter, Erich Maria Remarque, Josef von Sternberg, and a group of friends, I would always wonder: ‘To which world do I belong? Am I a bad star, a has-been star, or simply a zero?’ ‘Box office poison’ was the judgment of those gentlemen in Hollywood. But I had the same feeling as at the beginning of my career: what if I were to be a disappointment?”¹⁴⁵

It was in this mood that she received a call from Hollywood. Joe Pasternak, who had been so taken with her in Babelsberg, was now a Hollywood producer. He knew quite a bit about what the public wanted to see, yet he still chose good artists for his movies. Always open to new perspectives, Pasternak was willing to take a chance on offering a role to Dietrich, the “box office poison.” She would be playing a bargirl in a Western. Pasternak figured people would enjoy that. Dietrich accepted the offer in spite of the ludicrous salary of $75,000. The summer in Cap d’Antibes came to an abrupt end. Von Sternberg was the first in the group to learn that war was just days away. Dietrich became quite agitated and immediately planned to leave. Remarque wrote this in his diary on August 16, 1939: “The small, brightly lit, bare train station in Antibes. The train bleu. The puma gets in. Rudi insulted her at the last minute by saying that in the future she ought to respect him more. The train started up—waving—and with that, the summer was over.” Fifteen days later Hitler invaded Poland, and World War II began.